The story of Atlantis is one of history's enduring legends. So what’s the actual, ancient tale of Atlantis? Where does it come from? Was Atlantis real? And if not, why has the name become a byword for a lost city beneath the waves? In today's episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is back and ready to kick off 2025 with a bang. He is joined by Prof. Edith Hall to delve into the mystery that makes this fictional island so famous and discuss Atlantis's fictional origins in Plato's dialogues. Together they uncover why Plato created this mythical city and how it reflects his views on Athens' naval power, democracy, and morality.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Theme music from Motion Array, all other music from Epidemic SoundThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK
Chapter 1: What is the story of Atlantis?
Oh, das wäre geil, so eine Tretbootshow. Und wir spielen am 12.06. am Kino im Olympiasee. Im Kino am Olympiasee. And we play on the 12th of June in the cinema at Olympiasee in cooperation with our partner Backmarket, a live show, our very first Open Air.
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it's the ancients on history hit i'm tristan hughes your host and we're back ready to kick off 2025 we have so many exciting episodes coming your way with lots more ideas in the pipeline thank you for all of your suggestions for episodes we should do and for voting in our recent polls on spotify also about what episodes we should cover we're going to address all of those in due course over the weeks and months ahead
Now, back to today. We want to begin the new year with a bit of a bang. A name shrouded in mystery, but also one that you would all recognise. Atlantis felt like a clear winner. Today, Atlantis is quite the topic. It's regularly used in headlines whenever evidence of human activity and settlement is discovered underwater.
I've certainly seen the headline Britain's Atlantis be used several times over the past few years to label new discoveries in the North Sea, for instance. Atlantis is also popular in TV and film. Think DC Universe's Aquaman or the BBC 2010 series Atlantis. The Lost City of Atlantis is a regular title of videos and articles online today. So what's the actual ancient story of Atlantis?
Where does it come from? Was Atlantis real? Were there any potential real inspirations for the story of Atlantis? And if it wasn't real, why has the name Atlantis become a byword for a lost city beneath the waves? Well, to explain all, our guest today is the renowned Professor Edith Hall from Durham University.
Edith is here to explain how the original story of Atlantis stems back more than 2,000 years to the famous ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Sit back and relax as Edith talks through the ancient story of Atlantis and its links to the ancient Greek world. Edith, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you so much. It's a delight for me as well.
And to talk about this, the story of Atlantis, it feels like one of ancient history's most popular legends, and I stress legend, that still captures imaginations down to the present day. It's as popular as ever.
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Chapter 2: Was Atlantis a real place?
Aristotle is one of Plato's students, and he finds the Lyceum, and that's bigger and better for several reasons, one of which is that it did science material science, physics, biology, zoology, cosmology, as well as philosophy, the humanities subjects.
So we're just at the dawn, actually, of the ancient schools of philosophy, which were to go on for another 900 years until the schools were closed down by the Christian emperors.
So Timaeus and Critias, these particular dialogues, I mean, so what's the context of Of the story of Atlantis in these dialogues, why are these figures meeting up and ultimately go about talking about this legend of Atlantis some 9,000 years before they're alive?
These two dialogues form a pair, but they're also direct sequels to Plato's greatest work, The Republic. Now, The Republic is a dialogue set in the very late 5th century, and it discusses, basically, from a theoretical point of view, what would the ideal constitution of a city look like if you're a Platonic philosopher? What would it look like?
It's idealistic, it's a conjectural, it's hypothetical. The next day, we're told, some of the guys who were present at that dialogue and some who weren't met up for another day of festival, because this all takes place during a great Athenian festival, and decided what they needed to do on the suggestion of Socrates is think harder about this place.
This is called Kallipolis, which means the beautiful city, which so far in the discussion in the Republic has only existed as a hypothesis. We're going to try and see whether we can give a real concrete example of it.
And it turns out that Critias, who's one of the guys at this general symposium, knows a story of a real Kallipolis that existed all these thousand years ago, 98,000 years ago before that. And he says, well, actually, we don't need to be hypothetical anymore because I was told a story about a real place that existed.
And that was actually Athens of 9000 years ago before it got corrupted the way it is now. So we don't need a virtual city. We've got an example of a real Kallipolis. And it was our own city before it went bad. And because it's Plato, bad means democratic, run by unruly sailors, right?
Lots of blending of classes, lots of rowdy behaviour, lots of exciting theatrical culture, lots of law court litigation, all the things that made actually democratic Athens, in my view, the great place it was. Socrates has said he wants to outlaw, he wants a much more conservative, agrarian, very rigid class structure society in his hypothetical one in the Republic.
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Chapter 3: What did Plato say about Atlantis?
Yeah, so I said, dubious credibility, and yet the author of it, whoever's talking about it, Critias is saying, this is true, because I've heard it from all of these people.
The fact that I even have trouble remembering the detail in Plato's dialogue of these many hands is an example of how memory doesn't work when you're reporting it. This is always, Plato is such a clever writer. He's shouting at us all, this is an unreliable, orally transmitted account, but I'm still going to let you have it anyway.
So I think if we read these texts properly, Plato's admitting that it's as good as fiction.
And so if we get to the story itself, if we focus on Atlantis first of all, what does Plato say about Atlantis? Because if I can remember correctly, he seems to go into quite a lot of detail as to kind of the layout and structure of this city that he's created.
Oh, yes, it's beautiful. Listen, and it creates it very visually in your mind. Atlantis is founded basically by the god Poseidon. And Poseidon goes to these islands and these islands lie beyond the pillars of Hercules. So somewhere in the Eastern Atlantic, but these islands stretch from Egypt and sort of Spain and France. Okay. So these islands in the Eastern Atlantic, it's called Atlantis.
And Poseidon goes in and decides to actually set up people that, you know, it's not a proper community. It's not a proper civilization. And he goes in And he actually changes the whole geological constitution by creating this central island. And that is then surrounded by concentric marine canals. So if you can imagine a sort of circular island...
and then several alternating canals, which are just concentric rings and more blocks of land. And he creates all these places and puts bridges over them. And the reason why he wanted it like that was that he'd fallen in love with a human woman. This is very important because the Athenians are not descended from an actual sex act with a human.
There's a half-human element in the Atlanteans, which actually, when we go on to the ideal Athenians, doesn't quite share anything.
But Plato gives us, and I can only really recommend reading it, the most extraordinarily beautiful, and this is why people love it and why cartoon artists love it, detailed description of all these, especially the city centre island, which has temples carved with the most beautiful coloured murals, with incredible layers of incrustation of jewels and sanctuaries and statues.
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Chapter 4: How did Plato create the myth of Atlantis?
Nee, paddeln wir da drin rum oder was?
Hahaha.
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And so they have that naval power. I'm guessing, is the next step of that kind of looking elsewhere, do they start forging an empire?
Yes, they start taking over other places, just as the Athenian democracy had. They take over places from Tuscany to Egypt, and they're expanding. And here, I think that Plato is drawing actually on the Athenians' experience, not only of their own empire, but of the great Persian empire. There's a certain amount of Persia in these Atlanteans.
Also Phoenicians, because the Phoenicians were the great ancient sea power. So we sort of pick and choose from different colourful, what the Greeks called barbarian, that is non-Greek, ancient cultures that were actually older than the Greeks. And the Egypt thing is in there because we actually get the source is Egyptian. So there's plenty of ways of imagining these gaudy, quite barbarous people.
At first, their island is just a natural utopia. It's full of beautiful natural blessings like timber and flora and fauna. And it's got food in abundance, which when we come on to the ancient Athens, it didn't have. So they were actually lucky. He's implying they didn't need to build an empire. They had everything that they needed.
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Chapter 5: What were the characteristics of the Atlanteans?
And he's the one who said, this isn't me at all. This is the first work of historical fiction. But you still find, despite people saying, yes, that's the case, they tend to try to say, you know, the Atlanteans are Phoenicians or the Atlanteans are Persians or very often because of the cataclysm. They are the Minoans or Mycenaeans. This has been a very, very popular explanation.
So classical Greeks know that the Bronze Age civilizations of Mycenae and Crete had gone under. They'd been destroyed. The Greeks had entered a dark age. They'd lost writing. Their mode of production had actually regressed rather than progressed. In the case of Crete, it was very much regressed. know that there had been some kind of terrible flood. So there's a bit of that in it as well.
The Atlanteans are a conglomerate of lots of different earlier civilizations. And what I do is insist that no one will work. This is Plato imagining the most glamorous but decadent possible primordial civilization that was destroyed. And he's using every kind of other civilization he can to color that in.
Well, if we go, it's almost like the zenith, the climax of the story, Edith. I mean, how does this decadent Atlantean empire come into contact and conflict with this idealised Athens of 9,000 years ago? What's the story there?
Well, the story is that the Atlanteans' empire grows ever bigger and eventually the proud and noble race of Athenians decides to stand up against them. They're not going to become part of that empire. So there we very much have resonances of the Persian war story. Noble Greeks standing up against vastly larger forces from abroad and the huge navy as well as a huge army.
And they come into conflict. But in fact, the gods before the Atlanteans can take over the Athenians, decide to destroy the entire civilization and submerge it.
And as we've mentioned, that apocalyptic, cataclysmic end is what happens to Atlantis. And Atlantis is, in the original story, it is wiped off the face of the earth because of its own doing, basically. Yes.
Because of its own doing. And this is traced to this human strand from the original founding heroine that Poseidon had impregnated. They've got this bit of humanity in them, whereas the Athenians are rather mysteriously assumed to have somehow sprung from the soil, not through an act of sexual intercourse. They're kind of divinely created from the soil of Athens.
So the origins of these two different races ultimately help to explain why one survives and the other doesn't. One is simply more divine and less morally corrupt.
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Chapter 6: How did Atlantis's naval power lead to its downfall?
The other association, the Piraeus, is where the tyrants who took over Athens in 404, some Athenian tyrants at the end of the war, took it over and for a while managed to completely subvert the democracy. They installed a very different political regime. When they were finally killed by the rebellious Democrats, it was in Piraeus. So there's lots and lots of layers of this.
He absolutely hated, and here's a word for your audience, thalasocracy. The Greek for sea is thalassa, and a thalasocracy is an empire that asserts its rule through sea power. And Thucydides tells us that the very first thalasocracy was actually Minos' in Crete. That's the society that got wiped out by cataclysm. And the thalasocracy of the Atlanteans gets wiped out
And Plato is writing at a time when I guess he's very worried that Athens might become a thalassocracy again.
I had no idea just how much distaste Plato had for Athenian naval power. But I guess it also, on a slight tangent maybe, but you mentioned earlier how part of the Atlantis story is originally they're self-sufficient. They have enough supplies to look after themselves on their island. And I immediately think with Athens, like it's not just their warships.
I mean, they are having to get grain imported from the Black Sea. from North Africa. Is Plato thinking about that as well, about ships having to bring in supplies to sustain Athens when it's, well, an Athenian democracy?
Well, he doesn't address that practical problem. How are we going to make Athens a non-thalassocracy? Given the shortage of resources in the land of Attica, which is quite barren, they simply couldn't fit. That's why they invaded Sicily. The greatest disaster that lay behind their eventual loss of the war was the 413 catastrophic attempt to annex Sicily.
which is hard to believe now because it's so hot and dry, but was an incredible bread basket. The Romans knew that. They had these huge latifundia in the central plains of Sicily behind the mountains. You know, these are the bread baskets. That's why they went there. That's why they needed to go to Egypt all the time for various different things to eat.
And absolutely, that's why the Black Sea became so important. So Plato doesn't address this, which might be a good moment to move on to his description through Critias of the Aboriginal Athenian society.
Let's do it.
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Chapter 7: What influences did other cultures have on the Atlantis story?
I've heard of a whole sub, there's a whole sub genres out there often set in the future, you know, after whatever we humans do to the planet, we're going to have flood and fire then endless TV shows with the premise of there are just a few survivors. Atlantis sort of underlies far more stories than those just about Atlantis.
Do you think there's a clear defining moment? It's probably too difficult to say if there's one moment or wherever, where people start going from realising that Plato, when he's rediscovered, that this story of Atlantis is clearly just a legend that is created for him to put forward his own point. to then people saying, oh, Atlantis must have been this real place.
Maybe it was over here, or maybe it was over here, or we can associate it with this. Do you ever see a clear point when that starts becoming more, I'm not going to say mainstream, but more common that you get those sorts of interpretations?
Oh, it's right there in the Renaissance when people start reading Plato. People try to find it. And that, of course, is the great age of the first great European colonisation of the Americas and India for the sort of 15th century onwards. So wherever they went, they were trying to find Atlantis. The literalist reading of Plato. I don't think they understood it as fiction at all.
I think quite the opposite. I think that's a fairly recent academic proposition as we come to understand Plato's politics more. I mean, Atlantis has been discovered, you know, in the Dogger Bank.
Oh, yes. They say Britain's Atlantis, don't they? The submerged land in the North Sea.
I haven't done this research, but some other people have. It's been found in absolutely everywhere in the world that our ships have sailed. People have said this. And of course, there are all over the Mediterranean. There are submerged cities. Parts of northern Egypt fell off.
There was a great British museum exhibition lately of incredible finds of the north coast of Egypt, of bits of land fall off, water levels rise, cities get submerged. So you could actually sometimes find real cities that you can say must have been Atlantis. A lot of people say it's the Canary Islands, that there were other canaries because of their geographical position.
I mean, it's quite a game if you're a traveller. Ask anybody, wherever you go in the world. And once people actually got to the Australasian region, Tasmania, I mean, you name it, it's been Atlantis.
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