Atlantis

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 Sound The 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://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:46Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:20Tristan Hughes?

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• 3:07Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 3:49Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 4:29Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 5:03Tristan Hughes?

  Edith, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. It's a delight for me as well.

• 5:09Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yes, Atlantis is one of the few words from antiquity that is very generally recognised on the street, along with Aesop and Odysseus and just possibly, if you're lucky, sort of Medea or Troy. It's something that everybody knows about. Anything that's actually been Disneyfied, of course, enters an international, global, popular culture dimension that we would love all of classics to, probably at the moment only rivalled by gladiators.

• 5:51Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. Atlantis, Hercules, all of those ones. So let's start off with one of the big questions. First of all, Atlantis, was it real?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  The story of Atlantis is incredibly important culturally, not just because people love it so much, but because it's the first ever work of historical fiction, right? So it's the founding text of a genre that we all love, that is immensely popular, that has countless examples just in the classical world, some of the greatest novels about Pompeii, all the novels about Roman emperors, I, Claudius. It's the founding text of that. That entire genre, but it's by a philosopher called Plato. There are strands of truth in it in that the ancient Greeks and Romans were acquainted with tsunamis. They were acquainted with catastrophic, apocalyptic wipings out of civilizations.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  So the general kind of backstory that a whole culture can get wiped out by a natural disaster draws on reality. But this specific story is absolutely fiction and it was fiction designed for a very particular purpose at a very particular time.

• 7:02Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's explore this first of all, and that particular time, if you say this is the first loan historical fiction story. I mean, so how far back in time are we going? When were these sources that talk about the ancient myth of Atlantis?

• 7:16Speaker 03

  There's no trace of Atlantis before two dialogues by Plato that fit together, which are the Timaeus and the Critias. These are composed in the first third of the fourth century B.C. So nearly two and a half thousand years ago, but they set the story at least nine thousand years prior to that.

• 7:36Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  These are guys two and a half thousand years ago, imagining what happened actually for us, eleven and a half thousand years ago.

• 7:44Tristan Hughes?

  And this is a time like context following the Peloponnesian War. If Plato, he's in Athens at this time, what is the status of Athens following that big defeat they've had against the Spartans? Is it still kind of a philosophical hub at that time with the likes of Plato?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Athens is not just a philosophical hub, it's actually coming into its own as the philosophical hub. In the fifth century, Socrates, who was Plato's teacher, was more of a sort of freelance guy. He didn't have a particular university or institution. He would go around harassing people with his philosophical dialogues and interviews in public spaces like Market Square and the gymnasium. His student Plato founded the first what we would recognise as a university. Although it did no science, it was only humanities and maths in called the academy at some point in the very early fourth century B.C. So this is.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Community of like minded people, people who were rich enough and intellectually enough to want to spend their time discussing philosophical ideas. And these dialogues almost certainly result from actual lecture courses that he gave, these or at least seminars, discussions in the academy. And the philosophical history, you know, the history of ancient philosophies really kicks off at the academy. It's actually eclipsed, in my view, by the Lyceum of Aristotle. 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.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  So we're just at the dawn, actually, of the ancient schools of philosophy, which were to go on for another nine hundred years, until the schools were closed down by the Christian emperors.

• 9:32Tristan Hughes?

  So Timaeus and Critias, these particular dialogues, I mean, so what's the context 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 nine thousand years before they're alive?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  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 very late fifth 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,

• 10:30Speaker 03

  and decided what they needed to do on the suggestion of Socrates is think harder about this place. This is called Callipolis, 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 Calypolis that existed all these thousand years ago, nine thousand 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 nine thousand years ago, before it got corrupted the way it is now.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  So we don't need a virtual city. We've got an example of a real Calypolis. And it was our own city before it went bad. And because it's Plato, bad means democratic, run by unruly sailors, 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. Yes. Socrates has said he wants to outlaw, he wants a much more conservative, agrarian, very rigid class structured society in his hypothetical one, in the Republic. And lo and behold, Critias comes up with an account of such a conservative, class bound,

• 11:58Speaker 03

  rigid agrarian, non democratic, he thinks, ideal city state, which was what Athens was. So in a way, you've got a strange hypothetical future, meeting an actual allegedly materially historical past. So that's the conceit. But what Plato does very cleverly is actually cast, while he's letting Critias, because most of it's in the Critias, Timaeus kicks it off. But the full detailed account that comes down in all our novels, all our fictions, all our movies of Calypolis and its rival Atlantis, which is not Athenian, it's the complete opposite of Athens, it's a seagoing place, which gets destroyed because it's sinful. We've got these two historical rivals in a long ago war,

• 12:44Speaker 03

  supposedly in a very traditional old narrative that Critias has got access to. But we can go on to talk about just how Plato complicates that because he does cleverly point out how unreliable memories are going to be over nine thousand years. Well, I was going to ask that now. It sounds interesting if no other Athenians seem to know of this story.

• 13:03Tristan Hughes?

  But Critias, how does he know of this story supposedly from nine thousand years ago?

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Critias says that he had heard it from his grandfather, also named Critias, so that would be a man born in the much earlier fifth century. And this grandfather had heard it from his father, and his grandfather was ninety when he told it to the grandson. And he then says, Critias describes how he encountered the narrative. So he says, "A speech was once made by Solon, who's many generations ago ruler of Athens, Solon's relative Dropides, and Dropides was Critias's great-grandfather. So the grandfather then told it to Critias, who's now telling it to Socrates.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Then we've got it back to Solon via four or five hands in this family, all right? Critias is already six in the chain, but the trouble is that Solon said he'd got it off a priest in Egypt, okay? So we're now hearing it from Plato, so we are actually ninth in the chain from the original source, which is an Egyptian priest at least two hundred years before the date of the dialogue where it's set. So why does Plato bother to complicate all that? I think he's actually shouting to us, people tell stories that are completely unreliable and elaborated over many generations, while also wanting us to enjoy it. So it's a very peculiar way of setting up what's purportedly truth.

• 14:38Tristan Hughes?

  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."

• 14:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:12Tristan Hughes?

  And so if we get to the story itself, if we focus on Atlantis first of all,

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:17Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  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, somewhere in the eastern Atlantic. But these islands stretch from Egypt and sort of Spain and France, okay? There are these islands in the eastern Atlantic, it's called Atlantis. And Poseidon goes in and decides to actually set up people that, you know, that they're not, it's not a proper community, it's not a proper civilisation. And he goes in and he actually changes the whole geological constitution by creating this central island.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  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. But Plato gives us, and I can only really recommend reading it, the most extraordinarily beautiful,

• 16:57Speaker 03

  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. I mean, it's meant to be slightly over opulent. That's going to be part of the point, that these people were gaudy and too interested in material consumption and they were flashy and they were a bit vulgar and they liked spectacle. All the things that actually Plato accuses his contemporary Athenians of, just loving spectacle. But it's a beautiful, beautiful read.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  And that's really, I think, that and the actual cataclysm of what make this story what it is for posterity.

• 17:44Tristan Hughes?

  And does he make any mention about, I mean, the constitution, Edith, that they've got as well to give more character? Is to the whole city of Atlantis alongside all these concentric rings and channels of water?

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Yes, it's run by despotic monarchs with full power, but there's problems because there tend to be families with more than one boy. So we've already got inbuilt conflict, what the Greeks called stasis. You know, you've got a quarrelsome royal family running it. And the real problem comes after a while when they invent sea power. This is the crucial thing.

• 18:18Tristan Hughes?

  They invent it. Okay.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  They invent sea power. They invent the very first navy in the world. And there's a big description of it and how these huge, great triremes could go up and down all the channels. And this leads to growing decadence because they start trading with other nations, which makes them more greedy for money. And this is part of what leads to their moral downfall.

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• 21:18Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  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 colorful, 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're actually get the

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Sources 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. They, he's implying they didn't need to build an empire. They had everything that they needed.

• 22:32Tristan Hughes?

  Edith, it's also very interesting there because you mentioned the word Phoenicians, like an ancient Carthagin, as you say, a great maritime power. And I think I remember hearing you talking about this in the past, but if Atlantis is situated in the Atlantic, of course, you know, Greek traders aren't going that far west, but the Phoenicians, of course, are. And I think there's one Phoenician explorer who goes, who may even circumnavigate Africa.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 22:55Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think there is that potential link with Phoenicians with the Atlantis story?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  I absolutely do. And it's because they invent the sea power and the Greeks acknowledged that the first great sea power was not the Greeks. It was the Phoenicians and they freely admitted they'd learnt an awful lot about shipbuilding and how to run a navy from the Phoenicians. But any one to one correspondence fails because ultimately I think what the Atlanteans are doing is representing what the Athenians became under the democracy. Plato splits his vision of Athens in two and he puts one half of it in the idealized ancient Athens, primordial Athens of nine thousand years before, and one half of it in the Atlanteans. But by doing that, he's sort of implying that somehow the Athenians had become more like that these wicked barbarian nations.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  So no one to one correspondence really works. And I'm actually really the first scholars who have absolutely insisted on this. The most important article ever written was by a French scholar of considerable fame called Pierre Vidal Naké. 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

• 24:29Speaker 03

  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. And in the case of Crete, it was very much known that there had been some kind of terrible flood. So there's a bit of that in it as well. The Atlanteans are 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 colour that in.

• 25:10Tristan Hughes?

  Well, if we go to 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 idealized Athens of 9,000 years ago? What's the story there?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  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, destroyed to destroy the entire civilization and submerge it.

• 26:03Tristan Hughes?

  And so that is, we've mentioned it like 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.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:53Tristan Hughes?

  So that's the story of Atlantis. I mean, Edith, is there a particular reason as to why he chooses to create that story when he does? Is there a particular context as to why he writes that story at a particular time, the story of Atlantis, and to highlight Athens as, you know, he wished it had been?

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Yes, the ruination of Athens as imperial power was a result of the Peloponnesian War. The Peloponnesian War was a very, very long war. It went on from thirty-one B.C. Sorry, four, three, one B.C. to four oh five, four oh four. And after it, which is when Plato is actually writing, the Athenian Empire, which was run by its navy, never really got to be as important again. So what he's doing is sort of blaming the decadence of this, his city, on the supremacy given to the navy. Because, most importantly, the navy in Athens was centered in Piraeus, still is. And Aristotle tells us that by far

• 27:49Speaker 03

  the most radical democrats were in Piraeus. They were poor, free men who had to earn their living by rowing, both in the military, the naval force, and in the merchant navy. They had to go around all the islands, rowing around all the islands to collect the tribute and put people down when they rebelled against the Athenian Empire. Plato very particularly identifies the naval element in Athenian imperialism as the cause of its downfall. In the Tyre Republic, when he's building Calypolis, it's very, Calypolis has no navy. It's not to be given a navy. It must not have a navy. There's only one discussion. Of the navy and the entire republic. And that is the analogy of the ship of Thors,

• 28:32Speaker 03

  which is where the democratic sailors of Deidre Mutiny against, you know, the wise captain. That's the only example. And in another platonic text, which is even later, the laws, where some old sages actually plan a real city, slightly different. They draw up the constitution for a proposed new city in Crete. It is to be set more than 25 miles inland to ensure it will never, ever have a navy. So we've actually got, I think, a real anti navy obsession. The other association, the Piraeus, is it's where the tyrants who took over Athens in 404, the Athenian tyrants after 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.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  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 Thalasocracy again.

• 29:56Tristan Hughes?

  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, they're, 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. Do the, is Plato thinking about that as well, about ships having to bring in supplies to sustain Athens when it's a, well, an Athenian democracy?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Well, he doesn't address that practical problem. How are we going to make Athens a non Thalasocracy? 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. You know, 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 breadbasket. The Romans knew that. They had these huge latifandia in the, in the central plains of Sicily, behind the mountains. You know, these are the breadbaskets. 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.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:22Tristan Hughes?

  Let's do it.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  He actually says that there's been a very great deal of land erosion. Athens used to be much further from the sea, right? The peripheral coastlines have contracted and contracted and contracted. We used to be an agrarian inland community. There is some truth in that, that is environmental degradation in the coast of Greece, but nothing like what he's saying. And so his original Athens, it's emphatically mountain men who work very hard, unlike the Atlantean, but in a noble way. It's noble labour and eke a living with their goats and their flocks and their harvests from, they are self-sufficient. They have enough because A, they've got more land, hasn't been eroded, and B, they work very hard.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Even more important, most of us know the famous myth of the battle over Athens between Athena and Poseidon. Now Plato completely rewrites that. He has Attica founded by Athena and Hephaestus. He deletes Poseidon altogether. Poseidon goes off, that's why he goes off and found Atlantis. He's not in the myth. So he, he says basically that we should never have had Poseidon as the, the other god of Athens. Poseidon is the great god of the navy. There's a wonderful passage in Aristophanes' Knights, which is actually a love song to the Athenian navy. That poem, that play is all about this huge Number of passages directly designed for the seamen in the audience.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  And we have this extraordinary hymn, almost implying that Poseidon's more important than Athena at Athens as god of sea power. Oh, no. The original Athens has nothing to do with Poseidon whatsoever. It's the craft god who feasted us because he's clever and he's skillful and he's good at making plows and Athena. So the deletion of Poseidon from the history of Athens really says it all.

• 33:54Tristan Hughes?

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• 34:36Tristan Hughes?

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• 35:01Tristan Hughes?

  I'd like to bring in, you mentioned a bit earlier, Sicily. I'd like to ask you about that now, because how does Plato's story of Atlantis, how is it also linked to Plato personally visiting Sicily? And I think in particular, the city-state, the great city-state of Syracuse.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  I don't know the answer to that. And I'm one of the greatest skeptics about accounts of Plato in visiting Dionysius, the great tyrant of Syracuse. And we don't know how the dates work in terms of his visits. But many scholars do talk about that and say that actually, that rather tyrannical and indeed well-equipped with navy power, that while Syracuse is yet another ingredient in the portrait of the Atlanteans.

• 35:44Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough, okay. A slight tangent there, thank you for answering that quickly, Edith. So we've got the story of Plato's Atlantis and explained the reasons behind why he creates this dialogue. Do we know much about its intended audience and how popular the story was amongst Greek contemporaries?

• 36:01Speaker 03

  It does start to be referred to by others almost immediately afterwards and captured imagination up to a point of the philosophical schools. But really, it's the Renaissance that seizes on it. It becomes extremely popular as soon as Plato is rediscovered, because people like to paint it. We've got incredible number of visual images, 500 years before Disney, of how this worked. And of course, it got linked in with Christian stories, Judeo-Christian stories of humans being wiped out by floods because of their wickedness. It resonated with the story of Noah and the flood, the Deucalion empire story, the other floods.

• 36:44Tristan Hughes?

  Sodom and Gomorrah a bit maybe as well?

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So apocalyptic punishment for decadence and overextending your empires, that resonates very profoundly, which allowed it to be one of the stories from pagan antiquity that were assimilated very easily to Christian morality. And that sort of continued, I suppose, in terms of its acceptability. And that was further ramified by the excavations at Pompeii. Now, that wasn't flood, that was volcanoes. But Pompeii was first dug up much, much earlier in the Renaissance. A few workmen dug up a few completely obscene images and hastily covered them up.

• 37:23Tristan Hughes?

  The secret cabinet. Yes.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Well, they thought it was devil's work. I mean, they, they at that time thought that the devil had left these sort of huge phalluses. But when it was properly dug up, which was the 18th century, the idea, and then Pliny is read, the account of the volcano and the excavations at Pompeii didn't do indeed show an extraordinarily lively Mercantile society, thoroughly hybrid, ethnically mixed with a lot of pleasure going on, you know, bordello's and theatre, rue graffiti, murals showing really quite extraordinarily rude sexual things. As you say, the secret museum with Naples, they were kept under lock and key for a very long time, that the more obscene images.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  So Pompeii became yet another example. And of course, today, apocalyptic fiction of one kind and another has never been more popular. I've, I've heard of the term apocalypse porn. There's a whole subgenre out there. I've heard of a whole, there's a whole subgenres out there, often set in the, 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. It, it, Atlantis sort of underlies far more stories than those just about Atlantis.

• 38:40Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think there's a clear defining moment? It's probably too difficult to say at this 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, a legend that is created for his own, for him to put forward his own point, to then people think, 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, 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?

• 39:11Speaker 03

  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 from the sort of 15th century onwards. So wherever they went, they were trying to find Atlantis. That, that, 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.

• 39:42Tristan Hughes?

  Oh yes, they say Britain's Atlantis, don't they? They're submerged land in the North Sea.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  I haven't done this research, but some other people have. It's been found in absolutely everywhere in the world at our ships of sail. People have said there's, 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. 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 to discover, once people actually got to the Australasian region, Tasmania, I mean,

• 40:31Speaker 03

  you name it, it's been Atlantis.

• 40:33Tristan Hughes?

  It's funny, isn't it? Like, the word Atlantis has gone from, you know, being a place to actually just being the word that you say when an underwater archaeological treasure has been discovered. It's just something that people know. It's like a, it's a great catchline for people nowadays.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Exactly. Though I would actually say that what I'm saying is by far the minority view, if you're talking about popular opinion. Most people want to believe it and they want to have the mystery, just like they want to find Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.

• 41:01Tristan Hughes?

  Edith, you have explained brilliantly the, the context behind the story and why it's originally created by Plato. What a story it is, and the context of 4th century BC Athens. It just goes to me to say, Edith, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Thank you. I've loved it.

• 41:21Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Edith Hall talking through the real story of Atlantis. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to it. We will put a poll up on Spotify at the bottom of this episode, asking you if there are any other mystery cities that you'd like us to cover in the near future, or climactic events, events which may have caused the collapse of certain societies which become subsumed by nature. That will be on a poll beneath the episode. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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