Atlantis

Atlantis, a legendary island in the Atlantic Ocean, lying west of the Strait of Gibraltar. The principal sources for the legend are two of Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, philosophical works presented as conversations among Socrates and three interlocutors, including the Athenian statesman Critias, who recounts the story.

The legend of Atlantis

In Timaeus, Egyptian priests tell the Athenian statesman Solon, later counted among the Seven Wise Men of Greece, of an island larger than Asia Minor and Libya combined. They place it beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). According to the dialogue, Solon brought the story back from Egypt and Critias’s family preserved it for generations. The priests say that, about 9,000 years before Solon’s birth, Atlantis was a wealthy island whose powerful rulers conquered many Mediterranean lands before being defeated by the Athenians and their allies.

In Plato’s account in Critias, Atlantis was the domain of the sea god Poseidon. When the gods divided the earth among themselves, the island fell to Poseidon. He came to love a mortal woman called Cleito, the daughter of the island’s original inhabitants. To protect her, Poseidon surrounded the hill where she lived with alternating rings of land and water—two of land and three of sea—leaving the hill as the center of the island. He also created springs of hot and cold water and made the land abundantly fertile.

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In Search of Atlantis...

Cleito bore Poseidon five pairs of male twins. The eldest, Atlas, became the king and gave his name to both the island and the surrounding ocean. His nine brothers and their descendants ruled the remaining regions under his authority. Atlas’s throne passed from eldest son to eldest son through a long line of kings. Under their rule, Atlantis prospered, drawing wealth from its abundant natural resources and trade with other lands. At the center of the capital stood a temple to Poseidon and Cleito, enclosed in a boundary of gold.

For many generations the Atlanteans remained virtuous, valuing character above wealth and strictly obeying Poseidon’s laws. Over time, however, the divine qualities within them faded, and they abandoned these principles as baser human desires took hold. They became greedy and power-hungry, launching wars of conquest across the Mediterranean. Athens defeated them and freed their conquered territories. The Atlanteans’ moral decline drew the anger of the king of gods, Zeus, who resolved to punish them. Consequently, earthquakes and floods devastated Atlantis, and the island was engulfed by the sea.

Search for Atlantis

Atlantis is probably a mere legend, but medieval European writers who received the tale from Arab geographers believed it to be true, and later writers tried to identify it with an actual country. After the Renaissance, for example, attempts were made to identify Atlantis with America, Scandinavia, and the Canary Islands.

Many scholars interpret Atlantis not as a historical place but as a parable. They see it as a cautionary tale about a powerful and prosperous society brought down by its own ambition. In this reading Plato created Atlantis to illustrate his ideas about justice and the rise and fall of nations.

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Atlantis in popular imagination

The legend of the sunken kingdom retained a powerful grip on the popular imagination, recurring across fiction as a symbol of lost grandeur and hidden knowledge. French writer Jules Verne drew on the legend in his science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which his submariner passes the sunken ruins of the ancient city.

In American comics Atlantis is the underwater kingdom protected by the DC superhero Aquaman, who debuted in 1941 and was later portrayed on screen by Jason Momoa. Disney reimagined the legend for animation in the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), depicting the lost civilization as a technologically advanced world beneath the sea.