Atlantis: From Plato to Pop Culture

No lost civilization has gripped the human imagination longer, more stubbornly, or more productively than Atlantis. It has inspired philosophers, scientists, explorers, charlatans, novelists, filmmakers, and everyone in between for nearly two and a half millennia. Its hypothetical location has shifted multiple times: beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic Ocean, the remnants of Thera in the Mediterranean, Antarctica, the Azores, the Bahamas (Bimini Road), the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert. It has been cited as the origin of civilization, the explanation for the pyramids, the source of Mediterranean mythologies, and the homeland of extraterrestrial visitors. No single story, told by a single author, Plato, more than 2,300 years ago, has generated more sustained fascination in the history of Western thought.

Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion – photo by John Topping

Plato's Account — 360 BC

Around 360 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato introduced Atlantis in two dialogues: the Timaeus and the unfinished Critias. The story arrives through a chain of transmission that Plato presents with unusual care. The character Critias claims to have heard it from his grandfather, who heard it from the Athenian statesman Solon, who received it from Egyptian priests in the city of Sais during his travels around 590 BC. The priests, Solon was told, had records going back nine thousand years — far older than any Greek tradition. What those records described was a great island empire beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the passage we now call the Strait of Gibraltar, that had waged war against Athens and the Mediterranean world before sinking into the ocean in a single catastrophic day and night.

Plato's Atlantis was specific in ways that still feel striking. The island was vast — larger, he wrote, than Libya and Asia Minor combined. Its capital was laid out in concentric rings of land and water, centered on a hill where the god Poseidon had made his home with a mortal woman named Cleito. The Atlanteans were her descendants, part divine and part human. For generations they governed wisely. Then ambition and human frailty overtook them. They grew corrupt and expansionist, and the gods, displeased by their hubris, sent the catastrophe that erased them from the world.

Many classical scholars have treated Atlantis as a philosophical invention, a moral fable about the dangers of hubris and imperial overreach, created by Plato to make a political argument. Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, apparently dismissed it as fiction. But Plato presented the story, repeatedly and specifically, as true. Whether that insistence is itself part of the fiction, or whether Plato was recording something genuinely ancient is a question, the answer to which has been lost in antiquity.

The Enduring Mystery

For most of the following two thousand years, Atlantis occupied a modest corner of learned speculation. That changed in 1882, when a Minnesota congressman named Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Donnelly argued, with enormous energy and voluminous, if unreliable, evidence, that Atlantis had been real. It was the literal source of all ancient civilizations, the explanation for the similarity of the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico and the origin of every flood myth in every culture on Earth. The book was a sensation. It went through dozens of printings and sold hundreds of thousands of copies at a time when that was extraordinary. Donnelly essentially invented the modern Atlantis phenomenon. Nearly everything written about Atlantis since, both serious and fanciful, operates in the shadow of his work.

Donnelly’s map of the “Empire of Atlantis” from page 295 of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World

In 1870 Jules Verne sent Captain Nemo to walk through the ruins of Atlantis on the ocean floor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He pictured a drowned city, still standing in the dark depths of the Atlantic. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character, Professor Maracot, discovered survivors of Atlantis living in a deep Atlantic trench in his serialized tales published as The Maracot Deep in 1929. Even J.R.R. Tolkien consciously drew on the Atlantis myth in The Silmarillion with his telling of the downfall and destruction of Númenor. Tolkien even referred to his “Atlantis-haunting,” inspired by his recurring dream of a great wave swamping the land.

Serious archaeologists pointed to the Minoan civilization of Crete and the catastrophic eruption of the volcanic island of Thera around 1500 BC as a possible catalyst for its decline. The event devastated many parts of the Aegean world and may have contributed to the decline of the Minoan civilization. Tales of the eruption could have reached and been recorded by Egyptian scholars, raising the intriguing possibility that the distant memory of Thera played a part in Plato's account.

Atlantis in the Popular Imagination

By the twentieth century, Atlantis had moved well beyond archaeology and philosophy into something more fundamental: a permanent fixture of the cultural imagination. While and early 20^th century novels, including those mentioned above, introduced Atlantis into popular culture, the real breakthrough began with the 1961 movie, Atlantis, the Lost Continent. I have vivid memories of watching the movie on late-night television. These many years later I still remember the destruction of Atlantis and the survival of a Greek hero and an Atlantean princess in the final scene.

In 1977, NBC aired The Man from Atlantis, starring a young Patrick Duffy as the last survivor of the sunken continent. While the show didn’t last beyond the first season, I recall watching it. Fortunately for Patrick Duffy, he got the role of a lifetime playing Bobby Ewing in Dallas the following year. From the ‘70s to the ‘90s Atlantis appeared in fiction and film, from Warlords of Atlantis (1978) to MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis starring Richard Dean Anderson who would later return to Atlantis in Stargate Atlantis. Authors as diverse as Taylor Caldwell, Clive Cussler and Poul Anderson wrote about Atlantis, and the Scottish singer Donovan released a song entitled Atlantis that made it to number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969.

Disney introduced Atlantis to a new generation with Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2001, sending an amateur linguist named Milo Thatch on an expedition to a living Atlantis hidden beneath the ocean. The animated film portrayed Atlantis as a richly imagined civilization with its own language, technology, and history. The Atlantis mega resort opened on Paradise Island in the Bahamas in 1994, with its now-iconic pink Royal Towers following in 1998. The resort carries the theme further with its enormous aquariums built around the recreated underwater ruins of ancient Atlantis. I enjoyed staying at the resort and walking through the aquarium’s glass tunnels. I particularly enjoyed a huge goliath grouper haunting the ruins as well as a sawfish at least twelve feet long resting on the sandy bottom (two photos are below).

Stargate Atlantis (2004–2009) built a television universe around the premise that Atlantis was a city-ship created by an ancient, advanced race called the Ancients, parked at the bottom of an ocean in another galaxy. Aquaman, from DC Comics and the subsequent Warner Bros. films, has made the King of Atlantis one of the most recognizable superheroes in the world. The BBC ran its own Atlantis series from 2013 to 2015, reimagining it as a mythological realm of Greek legend. Video games, comic books, theme parks, and multiple documentaries have all staked their own claim on the story of Atlantis.

No other lost civilization, not El Dorado, not Lemuria, not Mu, not Shangri-La, has come anywhere near this level of sustained cultural production. Something about the tale of Atlantis has enabled it to survive prominently in our imaginations for generations.

Why Atlantis? The Archetype That Won't Fade

Atlantis was not simply a lost place. It was a civilization greater than our own that sowed the seeds of its own destruction. The combination of achievement and failure, of wisdom squandered by corruption, of a world more advanced than anything we know erased so completely that only a whisper of it survives, reminds us of our own hubris and the frailty of our civilization. Atlantis emerged from the golden age of myth, an age filled with heroes, gods, legends and tales of ultimate success, failure, reward and punishment.

Atlantis represents the archetypal golden age. Because Plato anchored it in geography and history and a chain of witnesses, it has always felt just real enough to seed our imaginations. Will the next expedition, the next sonar scan, the next underwater discovery finally uncover the germ of truth that gave birth to the legend?

Why I Created the Atlantis Universe

Atlantis has always fascinated me. From Verne, Tolkien, Conan Doyle and many others to the 1961 movie to multiple TV series, Atlantis hooked me at a young age. Why I developed the Atlantis Universe is a more difficult question. My musings about Atlantis took root in a writing class at Eagle Eye Bookstore in Decatur, Georgia. As part of a writing exercise, I wrote the beginning of a tale about the discovery of the body of an ancient astronaut on the Moon. The cover art of Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan (showing astronauts uncovering a dead astronaut) inspired that beginning. Starting a tale about Atlantis on the Moon is quite unique, which is why my publisher came up with the tagline, “The Quest for Atlantis Begins on the Moon.”

I went back to that tale months later when I started thinking about that body. If the dead astronaut was from an ancient civilization on Earth, what would that civilization have looked like? What if some remnant of that civilization survived? Wouldn’t they appear godlike to our ancient ancestors? Would they merely watch the cultural and physical evolution of our species or would they interact with us? Could the gods of multiple mythologies be the survivors of an ancient civilization interacting with mankind? From those questions, I developed my Unified Theory of Myth and Legend. That unified theory became the foundation of my Atlantis Universe.

I will explain my Unified Theory of Myth and Legend and revisit the legend of Atlantis in subsequent newsletters and blogs.

Sources and Further Reading: Plato, Timaeus and Critias, c. 360 BC; Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, 1882; Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Maracot Deep, 1929; J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 1977, and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Atlantis”; American Scientist, "The Minoan Eruption" (americanscientist.org).