Atlantis (episode)

***Legends Summarized: Atlantis*** is the fourty-sixth episode of the *Miscellaneous Myths* series and the eleventh episode of the *Legends Summarized* series by Red. In it, she discusses the origins, sources, depictions, and cultural impact of the lost city of Atlantis.

## Preamble

Red begins by stating that almost everyone knows about, and enjoys, the idea of Atlantis due to our innate desires to explore and discover incredible things and places. This love is then compared to our enjoyment of sci-fi adventures and outer space, an entire universe of new worlds and new civilizations waiting to be discovered by use of lightspeed drives, stargates, or whatever else is used to bypass the speed-of-light limitation.

People also love Atlantis for the same reasons; a place so close to home, and yet completely alien at the same time, which could just be waiting somewhere to be found. Atlantis is also a popular hubris story; a go-to example of a great civilization brought to ruin by its own hubristic decadence (aside from Rome.) It is mostly handled as a great, technologically advanced nation that screws up and sinks into the ocean; hard to get more "brought-to-ruin," than that.

Ultimately, the appeal of Atlantis is that it's so close to home; not some place far away. It's here, right in our oceans, something not totally unplausible, as it took humans until 2005 to discover the giant squids. With only 20% of the world's oceans actually explored, we already have a large number of strange and creepy creatures that we've found; those are just the ones we know about. With this, one has to wonder if a lost, ancient civilization slumbering beneath the waves is such a hard thing to believe. For anyone who isn't H. P. Lovecraft, it is hard to believe.

## Summary

### Plato's Position

the first reference to the lost city of Atlantis is from Plato around 360 BC, in his philosophical dialogues, *Timaeus* and *Critias*. In said dialogues, Plato claims to be recounting the event of the Athenian lawgiver and part-time poet Solon's visit to Egypt around the 580s BC. According to Plato, according to Solon, he translated ancient Egyptian records recounting events that happened 9,000 years earlier, which contained all the stuff about Atlantis.

However, there is no record that these sources even existed, suggesting that Plato probably made up Atlantis by himself. Originally, the point of *Timaeus* and *Critias* was to justify how Athens was cool and decadence was bad, as, 9,000 years prior, Athens successfully repelled a massive invading fleet of ships from a huge island nation in the Atlantic. There were two problems with this statement; 1.) Athens had only existed for a few centuries by the time of Plato, and 2.) People were still in the late Stone Age and could barely domesticate animals.

The dialogues pushed the idea that the Athenians were virtuous and pure, and eschewed luxury in favor of a literally Spartan lifestyle of militant training and no personal belonging; likely originating from Plato's admiration for Sparta's political structure at the time, preferring to model this ancient Athens as a more idealized version of modern Athens. This Athens also had an egalitarian society with few strange views on the role of women, especially in the military.

Plato's main point in the dialogues was that the less luxury one had, the more virtuous one was. He believed that luxury was inherently corruptive and drove people to become less virtuous; this was illustrated directly with his Athens-versus-Atlantis conflict. While Athens was off being warlike, successful, and Spartan, Atlantis had a very different experience.

### Atlantean Anecdote

The root premise of Plato's narrative is that, back in the old days, the gods divided up the world among themselves. In one instance, Athena got the region of Athens, while Poseidon got the island of Atlantis, which was a huge, resource-rich island nation containing pretty much anything a civilization needed. The island was describes as being bigger than Libya and Anatolia combined; by looking at maps of modern-day Anatolia, that makes it nearly the size of Texas, although it is worth noting that Plato's inconsistencies and absurd size of the island are wildly unplausible.

While at Atlantis, Poseidon falls in love with a mortal woman named Cleito, having five sets of twin boys with her; the eldest was named Atlas. This naming scheme is handedly-explained by Plato, who states that he localized and hellenized the translated names into Greek based off of their original, etymological, non-Greek names. These names were derived from the dubious Egyptian records of Atlantis made up by Plato himself.

While Poseidon was creating a walled-up empire of Cleito, he began divvying up the island among his demigod children. Atlantis became divided into ten parts, with the central region ruled by Atlas–King of Atlantis–and the rest of the island ruled by his brothers. Similar to Helen of Troy, the brothers formed an alliance for, in case of two brothers declaring war, all other brothers will join the conflict to assist the injured party.