“For Anderson and his ilk, the answer is always the same: We’ll never find Atlantis because it’s entirely fictitious. But that hasn’t stopped the supposed existence of the lost island (or continent) from sparking the public’s imagination—and leaving more than a thousand years of speculation and conspiracy theories in its watery wake.” “Atlantis is the stuff of modern fare like Journey to the Center of the Earth and the recent Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. But the story is the brainchild of the Greek philosopher Plato, who featured the island in two of his Socratic dialogues from the fourth century B.C.. Plato called it Atlantis nêsos, or the “island of Atlas,” and the philosopher didn’t intend it to represent the pinnacle of human achievement. Instead, the island civilisation was designed as a fictional foil to the real city of Athens. In Plato’s dialogues, Atlantis is presented as a sophisticated state that fell after its hubristic leaders attempted to invade Greece. In retribution for its people’s hunger for power, said Plato, Atlantis was punished by the gods, who unleashed natural disasters that caused it to sink into the sea, annihilating what remained of its power. ‘Plato is a liar,’ says Flint Dibble, an archaeologist and Marie-Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at Cardiff University. ‘He never claims to be writing history.’ But though Plato’s dialogues include plenty of clues that the city was imaginary, including the dialogue’s characters’ own insistence that the story was hearsay at best, the idea of Atlantis has fuelled imaginations ever since, along with claims it was a real place whose remains contain proof of a lost, superior civilisation.” “Hundreds of years after Plato’s death, the Atlantis story began resurfacing first in the writings of Christian and Jewish philosophers, then in speculative works by the likes of Sir Francis Bacon, whose novel The New Atlantis was published posthumously in 1626. In the book, Atlantis is a utopian society on a remote Pacific island whose inhabitants are learned, humane—and deeply Christian. At the time, Europeans were grappling with a sea change in their vision of the world, one that was expanding dramatically with increasing contact between Europeans and Indigenous people throughout the Americas and Pacific during the Age of Exploration.” “‘According to Plato, Atlantis was trying to destroy civilisation,’ says Anderson. ‘Atlantis was the bad guy in Plato’s story.’ Instead of obsessing over the likelihood of the island’s existence, the archaeologist says, it’s worth revisiting Plato’s own exploration of hubris and the dangers of unchecked power—themes that still resound all too well some 24 centuries after the philosopher first spun his tale.”—”Why the myth of Atlantis just won’t die. The lack of evidence for its existence hasn’t stopped people from hunting for it—or insisting that archaeologists are involved in a cover-up.”

Also, post—”Yes, I called Plato a liar. He is a lying liar, and I can back it up.”