Was Atlantis Real? Plato's Invention and the Search That Never Ends

The story is told in the Timaeus and the unfinished Critias, as an account that Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, was supposed to have heard from Egyptian priests two centuries earlier. Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, was larger than Libya and Asia together, and was ruled by ten kings descended from Poseidon, from a capital of concentric rings of land and water, with harbours, temples plated in a metal called orichalcum, and a canal to the sea. It ruled the Mediterranean as far as Italy and Egypt, it grew corrupt, it attacked, the Athenians of that age, alone, threw it back, and then earthquakes and floods took both the Athenian army and the island in a single terrible day. The Critias breaks off in the middle of Zeus preparing to punish the Atlanteans, and the third dialogue that was to complete the set was never written.

The Atlantis story is the illustration for the argument of the Republic, which Plato's speakers say they had discussed the day before: what would the ideal state look like in action? Ancient Athens, in the story, is that state, small, virtuous and victorious over a rich, sprawling, sea-going tyranny, which is Athens's own empire of the fifth century seen through a critic's eye and, perhaps, the Persia that it had defeated. The details are those of a thought experiment, the round numbers, the perfect geometry of the rings, the improbable dates, and Plato uses the same device elsewhere, inventing a myth to make a point and telling his readers as much. The Egyptian source is a standard Greek way of lending a tale antiquity, and the flood that ends it is the flood that ends every Greek age of the world. The signs that it is fiction:

• •No earlier source, in Greece or Egypt, mentions Atlantis, and none of the many Greek writers on geography and history treats it as real
• •The date, 9,600 BC, is before agriculture, cities or bronze anywhere on Earth
• •The size, larger than North Africa and Asia Minor together, would leave a trace on the Atlantic floor that a century of seabed mapping has not found
• •The story serves a stated philosophical purpose in the dialogues that contain it

Fiction is made of things, and Plato's was made of memories available to a fourth-century Athenian. The eruption of Thera, the island now called Santorini, around 1600 BC, blew the centre out of a Minoan island town, sent tsunamis across the Aegean and contributed to the fall of the Minoan civilisation of Crete, a sea power with a bull cult and palaces; the story could carry a dim memory of that, moved westward and multiplied by ten. The city of Helike on the Gulf of Corinth was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami and sank in 373 BC, in Plato's own lifetime, and was visible under the water for centuries. The Athenian navy's disaster at Syracuse in 413 BC and the fall of the empire that followed gave the moral. None of these is Atlantis; each is a piece of the furniture in the room where it was invented.

For eighteen centuries almost nobody took the story literally. Then the discovery of America gave it a geography, and from the sixteenth century onward Atlantis was placed in the New World, in the Canaries, in Sweden by a Swedish professor who spent thirty years on it, and, after 1882, in the Atlantic, when an American congressman, Ignatius Donnelly, published a bestseller arguing that Atlantis was the mother civilisation of Egypt, Mexico and everyone else and that its survivors were the gods of every mythology. Donnelly's book is the source of nearly every later theory. The Nazi party's research institute looked for it in Tibet and Iceland as the Aryan homeland; the medium Edgar Cayce predicted its rise near Bimini in 1968 or 1969, and the underwater rock formation found there in 1968 is a natural beachrock pavement; and satellite images, Antarctic maps and the Richat structure in Mauritania have each had their season. The searches keep finding sunken cities, which the Mediterranean has in plenty, and none of them is larger than Asia.

Atlantis is the perfect lost thing: precise enough to seem findable, vanished completely enough never to be disproved, and moral enough to mean whatever the finder wants, a golden age, a warning, a hidden ancestor. It also lets its believers explain the achievements of ancient peoples without crediting those peoples, which is why the theory that Egyptians and Maya learned from Atlanteans has always had an ugly undertone. Plato, who invented it to show how a proud empire falls, would have recognised the pattern. The island exists, exactly where he put it, in a book, and it has done more work there than any real island ever did.

Atlantis was invented by Plato around 360 BC, in two dialogues, as a parable of a rich and arrogant sea empire defeated by an ideal Athens and sunk by the gods, with no earlier source, an impossible date and a stated philosophical purpose, and probably furnished from memories of the Thera eruption, the sinking of Helike and the fall of Athens's own empire. The modern search descends from an 1882 bestseller, has placed the island on every continent and under every ocean, and has found nothing, because there was nothing to find.