Atlantis

Also Known As: the Atlantic island, named for Atlas, Poseidon’s eldest son by the mortal Cleito; the central city itself is never given a name of its own
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A sea empire built on rings of water and land turned as though on a lathe, rich in a lost red metal called orichalcum, and sunk in a single day and night.
Role in Mythos: It is the aggressor from beyond the Pillars of Heracles that prehistoric Athens defeats before the sea takes both of them.
Relation to Humans: Its ten kings held the whole western Mediterranean as far as Egypt and Tuscany and were preparing to take the rest when Athens stopped them. Nobody can visit it now, because the island’s collapse left a bar of shallow mud across the ocean that closed the sea to shipping.

Three rings of water and two of land, turned as though on a lathe, with a girl on the hill at the centre of them. That is where the city starts, and every later extravagance grows out of that one act of possessive engineering. Poseidon wanted Cleito, whose parents had just died and left her alone on a low mountain in the middle of the island; he broke the ground around her and drew the sea up into circles so that no man could reach her, because in those days there were no ships. Then he brought two springs out from under the rock, one hot and one cold, and made the soil give food without being asked.

She bore him ten sons in five sets of twins. He divided the island into ten portions, gave the largest and best to the eldest, and named that son Atlas, and after Atlas the whole island and the ocean around it took their name.

What his descendants did with the place took generations. They bridged the rings and cut a canal from the sea three hundred feet wide and a hundred deep, wide enough at the mouth for the largest vessels, and they hollowed docks straight out of the living rock, roofing them with the stone they had not removed. The quarried stone came up white, black and red, and they set the colours against each other in the walls for the pleasure of looking at them. The outermost circuit they sheathed in brass. The next in tin. The wall of the citadel itself they coated in orichalcum, a metal that was already only a word by the time the story was being told, and which flashed red when the light caught it. Inside stood a temple a stadium long, silver outside with gold on the pinnacles, ivory overhead, everything else lined again in that red metal, and in the middle of it a gold Poseidon so large his head touched the roof, driving six winged horses, with a hundred Nereids on dolphins around him because a hundred was thought to be the right number in those days.

Beyond the walls the country ran flat for three thousand stadia one way and two thousand the other, facing south, sheltered from the north wind, cut through by a ditch so vast that the man describing it stops to admit it sounds impossible. It caught the water off the mountains and carried it round the whole plain and out to sea, and lesser canals ran off it every hundred stadia to float timber down. The land gave two harvests a year, one on rain and one on irrigation, and it fed elephants.

Crossing the outer harbours on an ordinary morning, you would have come into a district packed solid with houses, the canal and the great basin crowded with foreign shipping, and a noise of voices and clatter that never stopped, day or night.

Every fifth year, and then every sixth, the ten kings met at a pillar of orichalcum in the temple and settled their disputes. First they had to catch a bull. There were bulls loose in the precinct, and the kings hunted them alone and without weapons, using staves and nooses, and cut the throat of the one they caught over the top of the pillar so the blood ran down across the laws written on it. They burned the limbs, mixed a bowl of wine with a clot of blood for each of them, drank from golden cups and swore to judge by what was written. Then they put out every fire in the temple, changed into robes of deep blue, and sat down on the ground in the dark over the cooling embers to give judgment, and wrote their verdicts at daybreak on a tablet of gold.

For a long time the god’s blood in them held and they carried the wealth lightly, thinking gold something of a nuisance. Then the divine portion thinned, diluted too often with the mortal, and they went bad in a way only a discerning eye could see. To everyone else they looked more magnificent than ever, at precisely the moment they were at their greediest. Nine thousand years before Solon, by the reckoning an old priest at Saïs gave him, that power came out of the Atlantic and tried to take Egypt and Greece in one blow, and Athens, abandoned by her allies and fighting alone, beat it. Afterwards there were earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night the Athenian army went into the ground and the island went under the sea.

There is no other ancient source. Everything anyone has ever said about Atlantis grows out of roughly twenty-five pages written by one Athenian around 360 BC, in the unfinished pair of dialogues we call the Timaeus and the Critias, and Plato is not reporting a tradition so much as building one. Christopher Gill argued in 1977 that the Atlantis narrative belongs to a genre Plato was in the process of inventing, extended fiction wearing the full costume of historical record, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet put it more bluntly still by calling the result the first science fiction. The contrast the story exists to make is not between Greece and some drowned Atlantic empire at all. It is between an idealised prehistoric Athens and the naval empire Plato’s own city had recently been.

Doubt about it is nearly as old as the text. Writing around the turn of the era, Strabo records Poseidonius weighing whether the island could really have existed, and preferring that to the verdict already in circulation, that its inventor had made it disappear just as Homer disposed of the wall the Achaeans built. Strabo does not say who first made the joke, though it has been credited to Aristotle for two centuries on no stated authority. The modern industry is much younger and has one clear founder: Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota congressman whose Atlantis: The Antediluvian World of 1882 argued that every ancient civilisation descended from the island, and whose thirteen propositions still underwrite most of what circulates today.

The place gives everything and holds none of it. Two crops a year, hot and cold water on tap, a metal worth more than anything but gold, timber, elephants, twelve hundred ships and ten thousand chariots, and all of it conditional on a strain of divinity that was always going to run out. Once it did, the island had no defence at all, and the one thing it left behind was an obstruction: shallow mud where the land had been, enough to close that stretch of ocean to any ship that tried it. Zeus called the gods together into their holy house at the centre of the world, and stood up to speak, and the sentence breaks off there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Atlantis?

Atlantis is a legendary island empire that appears in two dialogues by the Greek philosopher Plato, the Timaeus and the Critias, written around 360 BC. It lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles, was ruled by ten kings descended from Poseidon, and sank beneath the sea in a single day and night after losing a war against prehistoric Athens.

Was Atlantis real?

No ancient source other than Plato mentions Atlantis, and the scholarly view is that he invented it. Christopher Gill’s 1977 study argued that the story is extended fiction presented with the trappings of historical record, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet described Plato’s achievement there as the invention of science fiction. Scepticism began early: Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, already records the verdict that the man who invented the island was the one who sank it.

Why did Atlantis sink?

In Plato’s account the Atlanteans were descended from Poseidon, and while the divine element in them was strong they governed well and cared little for their wealth. As that divine portion was diluted by mortal blood, they turned greedy and imperial, and Zeus assembled the gods to punish them. Earthquakes and floods followed, and the island went under in a day and a night.

What is orichalcum?

Orichalcum is the red metal Plato says was mined all over Atlantis and valued above everything except gold. The Atlanteans faced the wall of their citadel with it, lined the interior of Poseidon’s temple with it, and inscribed their laws on a pillar of it. Plato notes that by his own time the substance was nothing more than a name.

Where was Atlantis supposed to be?

Plato places it in the Atlantic, directly in front of the straits known as the Pillars of Heracles, and calls it larger than Libya and Asia combined. Its kings ruled other islands and parts of the opposite continent, and held territory inside the straits as far as Egypt and Tuscany. After the island sank, the sea there was left impassable because of the shallow mud its collapse produced.