13. From Catastrophe to Legend
The destruction of the Minoan civilization eventually morphed in Greek mythology into the legend of the lost civilization of Atlantis. The Atlantis legend began circa 360 BC, when the philosopher Plato wrote about a utopian, advanced, and dramatically lost country that vanished beneath the waves, in his Timaeus and Critias dialogues. In popular culture today, Atlantis is presented as a peaceful and wise country, an idealized model of what humanity could be. That was not Plato’s Atlantis, though. He wrote about a rich, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful country that was corrupted by its power. It tried to conquer the world, and the good guys in Plato’s narrative were not the good people of Atlantis, but Athens and her allies, who fought back. If Plato’s Atlantis existed today, it would probably try to conquer and enslave us all.
