A Philosopher’s Fake City, That Many Came to Believe is Real
Plato kicked off the legend of Atlantis circa 360 BC, when he wrote in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues about a utopian, advanced, and dramatically lost country that vanished beneath the waves. In popular culture nowadays, 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 Alanteans, but Athens and her allies, who fought back. If Plato’s Atlantis existed today, it would be Wakanda’s evil sibling: rather than help the world, it would try to conquer and enslave us all.
That Atlantis, eventually sunk by the gods as punishment for its people’s hubris and moral decline, was fake – a fictional plot device to advance some philosophical points. Centuries later, many began to believe that Atlantis was real, and tried to prove its existence. The legend’s modern era revival and its transformation into popular pseudoscience can be traced back to a nineteenth century amateur historian and Congressman, Ignatius Donnelly. He wrote an 1882 book, The Antedeluvian World, in which he added new “facts” that became part of the Atlantis myth. He also theorized that all major human advances can be traced back to Plato’s sunken island.
