Atlantis

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Thank you for all 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.

Speaker 1 We're going to address all of those in due course over the weeks and months ahead. Now, back to today.

Speaker 1 We wanted to begin the new year with a bit of a bang, a name shrouded in mystery, but also one that you would all recognize. Atlantis felt like a clear winner.
Today, Atlantis is quite the topic.

Speaker 1 It's regularly used in headlines whenever evidence of human activity and settlement is discovered underwater.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Where does it come from? Was Atlantis real? Were there any potential real inspirations for the story of Atlantis?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Sit back and relax as Edith talks through the ancient story of Atlantis and its links to the ancient Greek world.

Speaker 1 Edith, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 19 Thank you so much. It's a delight for me as well.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's as popular as ever.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It's something that everybody knows about. Anything that's actually been Disney-fied, of course, enters an international, global, popular culture.

Speaker 19 dimension that we would love all of classics to probably at the moment only rivaled by gladiators.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 No.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 So it's the founding text of a genre that we all love, that is immensely popular.

Speaker 19 that has countless examples just in the classical world of some of the greatest novels about Pompeii, all the novels about Roman emperors, I Claudius.

Speaker 19 It's the founding text of 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.

Speaker 19 They were acquainted with catastrophic, apocalyptic wipings out. of civilizations.
So the general kind of backstory that a whole culture can get wiped out by a natural disaster draws on reality.

Speaker 19 But this specific story is absolutely fiction. And it was fiction designed for a very particular purpose at a very particular time.

Speaker 1 Well, let's explore this first of all in that particular time. If you say this is the first known historical fiction story, I mean, so how far back in time are we going?

Speaker 1 When were these sources that talk about the ancient myth? of Atlantis?

Speaker 19 There's no trace of Atlantis before two dialogues by Plato that fit together, which are the Timaeus and the Critias.

Speaker 19 These are composed in the first third of the fourth century BC, so nearly two and a half thousand years ago. But they set the story at least 9,000 years prior to that.

Speaker 19 And these are guys 2,500 years ago imagining what happened actually for us 11,500 years ago.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Is it still kind of a philosophical hub at that time with the likes of Plato?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 His student Plato founded the first what we would recognize 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 BC.

Speaker 19 So this is a community of like-minded people, people who were rich enough and intellectual enough to want to spend their time.

Speaker 19 discussing philosophical ideas and these dialogues almost certainly result from actual lecture courses that he gave, these at least seminars, discussions in the Academy.

Speaker 19 And the philosophical history, you know, the history of ancient philosophy is really kicks off at the Academy. It's actually eclipsed, in my view, by the Lyceum of Aristotle.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 material science, physics, biology, zoology, cosmology, as well as philosophy, the humanities subjects.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 So Timaeus and Critias, these particular dialogues, I mean, so what's the context of the story of Atlantis in these dialogues?

Speaker 1 Why are these figures meeting up and ultimately go about talking about this? legend of Atlantis some 9,000 years before they're alive.

Speaker 19 These two dialogues form a pair, but they're also direct sequels to Plato's greatest work, The Republic.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 What would it look like? It's idealistic, it's a conjectural, it's hypothetical.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 This is called Callipolis, which means the beautiful city. which so far in the discussion in the Republic has only existed as a hypothesis.

Speaker 19 We're going to try and see whether we can give a real concrete example of it.

Speaker 19 And it turns out that Critias, Critias, who's one of the guys at this general symposium, knows a story of a real Callipolis that existed all these thousand years ago, 9,000 years ago before that.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And that was actually Athens of 9,000 years ago before it got corrupted the way it is now. So we don't need a virtual city.

Speaker 19 We've got an example of a real Callipolis and it was our own city before it went bad.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And lo and behold, Critias comes up with an account of such a conservative, class-bound, rigid, agrarian, non-democratic, he thinks, ideal city-state, which was what Athens was.

Speaker 19 So in a way, you've got a strange hypothetical future meeting an actual, allegedly, materially historical past. So that's the conceit.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But the full detailed account that comes down in all our novels, all our fictions, all our movies of Callipolis and its rival, Atlantis, which is not Athenian, it's the complete opposite of Athens.

Speaker 19 It's a seagoing place, which gets destroyed because it's sinful.

Speaker 19 We've got these two historical rivals in a long ago war, supposedly in a very traditional old narrative that Chritias has got access to.

Speaker 19 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 9,000 years.

Speaker 1 Well, I was going to ask that now. It sounds interesting if no other Athenians seem to know of this story, but Critias, how does he know of this story supposedly from 9,000 years ago?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And his grandfather was 90 when he told it to the grandson. And he then says, Critias describes how he encountered the narrative.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So the grandfather then told it to Critias, who's now telling it to Socrates. So we've got it back to Solon via four or five hands in this family, all right? Critias is already six in the train.

Speaker 19 But the trouble is that Solon said he'd got it off a priest in Egypt. Okay.

Speaker 19 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 200 years before the date of the dialogue where it's set.

Speaker 19 So why does Plato bother to complicate all that?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So it's a very peculiar way of setting up what's purportedly truth.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So I think if we read these texts properly, Plato is admitting that it's as good as fiction.

Speaker 1 And so if we get to the story itself, if we focus on Atlantis first of all,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Okay, so these islands in the eastern Atlantic, it's called Atlantis.

Speaker 19 And Poseidon goes in and decides to actually set up people that, you know, they're not, it's not a proper community, it's not a proper civilization.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 when we go on to the ideal Athenians, doesn't quite share.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 especially the city centre island, which has temples carved with the most beautiful coloured murals with incredible layers of encrustation of jewels and sanctuaries and statues.

Speaker 19 I mean, it's meant to be slightly over-opulant.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 All the things that actually Plato accuses his contemporary Athenians of just loving spectacle. But it's a beautiful, beautiful read.

Speaker 19 And that's really, I think, that and the actual cataclysm of what make the story what it is for posterity.

Speaker 1 And does he make any mention about the constitution, Edith, that they've got as well to give more character as to the whole city of of Atlantis alongside all these concentric rings and channels of water?

Speaker 19 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 call stasis.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 They invent it.

Speaker 11 Okay, yeah.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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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Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Yes, they start taking over other places, just as the Athenian democracy had.

Speaker 19 They take over places from Tuscany to Egypt, and they're expanding.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Also Phoenicians, because the Phoenicians were the great ancient sea power.

Speaker 19 So we sort of pick and choose from different colourful, what the Greeks call barbarian, that is non-Greek ancient cultures that were actually older than the Greeks.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 At first, their island is just a natural utopia.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 1 it's also very interesting there because you mentioned the word phoenician so like kind of ancient carthage and 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 traders aren't going that far west, but the Phoenicians, of course, are.

Speaker 1 And I think there's one Phoenician explorer who goes, who may even circumnavigate Africa. Absolutely.
So, do you think there is that potential link with Phoenicians with the Atlantis story?

Speaker 19 I absolutely do. And it's because they invent the sea power, and the Greeks acknowledge that the first great sea power was not the Greeks, it was the Phoenicians.

Speaker 19 And they freely admitted they'd learned an awful lot about shipbuilding and how to run a navy from the Phoenicians.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Plato splits his vision of Athens in two and he puts one half of it in the idealized ancient Athens, primordial Athens of 9,000 years before, and one half of it in the Atlanteans.

Speaker 19 But by doing that, he's sort of implying that somehow the Athenians had become more like that these wicked barbarian nations. So no one-to-one correspondence really really works.

Speaker 19 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 Nacquet.

Speaker 19 And he's the one who said, this isn't me at all. This is the first work of historical fiction.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The Greeks had entered a dark age, they'd lost writing, their mode of production had actually regressed rather than progressed.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The Atlanteans are a conglomerate of lots of different earlier civilizations. And what I do is insist that no one will work.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 What's the story there?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So there we very much have resonances of the Persian War story. Noble Greeks standing up against vastly larger forces from abroad and a huge navy as well as a huge army.

Speaker 19 And they come into conflict, but in fact, the gods, before the Atlanteans can take over the Athenians, just try to destroy the entire civilization and submerge it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we've mentioned it like that apocalyptic, cataclysmic end is what happens to Atlantis.

Speaker 19 And Atlantis is, in the original story, it is wiped off the face of the earth because of its own doing, basically because of its own doing and 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.

Speaker 19 One is simply more divine and less morally corrupt.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Yes, the ruination of Athens as imperial power was a result of the Peloponnesian War. And the Peloponnesian War was a very, very long war.
It went on from 31 BC, sorry, 431 BC to 405, 404.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And Aristotle tells us that by far the most radical Democrats weren't Piraeus.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Plato very particularly identifies the naval element in Athenian imperialism as as the cause of its downfall. In the entire republic, when he's building Callipolis, it's very Callipolis has no navy.

Speaker 19 It's not to be given a navy. It must not have a navy.

Speaker 19 There's only one discussion of the navy in the entire republic, and that is the analogy of the ship of fools, which is where the democratic sailors of Daja mutiny against, you know, the wise captain.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 They draw up the constitution of 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.

Speaker 19 So we've actually got, I think, a real anti-navy obsession.

Speaker 19 The other association, the Piraeus, is it's where the tyrants who took over Athens in 404, some Athenian tyrants after the end of the war, took it over and for a while managed to completely subvert the democracy.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He absolutely hated, and here's a word for your audience, thalassocracy. The Greek for sea is thalasa, and a thalassocracy is an empire that asserts its rule through sea power.

Speaker 19 And Thucydides tells us that the very first thalassocracy was actually Minoses in Crete. That's the society that got wiped out by cataclysm.
And the thalassocracy of the Atlanteans gets wiped out.

Speaker 19 And Plato is writing at a time when I guess he's very worried that Athens might become a thalassocracy again.

Speaker 1 I had no idea just how much distaste Plato had for Athenian naval power.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They have enough supplies to look after themselves on their island. And I immediately think with Athens, like it's not just their warships.

Speaker 1 I mean, they are having to get grain imported from the Black Sea, from North Africa.

Speaker 1 Is Plato thinking about that as well, about ships having to bring in supplies to sustain Athens when it's

Speaker 1 an Athenian democracy?

Speaker 19 Well, he doesn't address that practical problem. How are we going to make Athens a non-thalassocracy? Yes.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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 bread basket.

Speaker 19 The Romans knew that. They had these huge latifundia in the central plains of Sicily behind the mountains.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And absolutely, that's why the Black Sea became so important.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 Let's do it.

Speaker 19 He actually says that there's been a very great deal of land erosion. Athens used to be much further from the sea, right?

Speaker 19 The peripheral coastlines have contracted and contracted and contracted. We used to be an agrarian inland community.

Speaker 19 There is some truth in that, that is environmental degradation, the coasts of Greece, but nothing like what he's saying.

Speaker 19 And so his original Athens, it's emphatically mountain men who work very hard, unlike the Atlanteans, but in a noble way, it's noble labor, 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He deletes Poseidon altogether. Poseidon goes off.
That's why he goes off and founds Atlantis. He's not in the myth.
So

Speaker 19 he says basically that we should never have had Poseidon as the other god of Athens. Poseidon is the great god of the navy.

Speaker 19 There's a wonderful passage in Aristophanes' Knights, which is actually a love song of the Athenian Navy.

Speaker 19 That poem, that play is all about this huge number of passages directly designed for the seamen in the audience.

Speaker 19 And we have this extraordinary hymn almost implying that Poseidon is more important than Athena at Athens as god of sea power. Oh no, the original Athens has nothing to do with Poseidon whatsoever.

Speaker 19 It's the craft god, Hephaestus, 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.

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Speaker 8 I know, I'm putting them back.

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Speaker 12 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 7 We're glad we could assist.

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Speaker 1 I'd like to bring in, you mentioned a bit earlier, Sicily. I'd like to ask about that now because how does Plato's story of Atlantis, how is it also linked to Plato personally visiting Sicily?

Speaker 1 And I think in particular, the city-state, the great city-state of Syracuse?

Speaker 19 I don't know the answer to that and I'm one of the more greatest sceptics 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 and but many scholars do talk about that and say that actually the rather tyrannical and indeed well-equipped with navy power that was Syracuse is yet another ingredient in the portrait of the Atlanteans.

Speaker 1 Fair enough. Okay, well 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.

Speaker 1 Do we know much about its intended audience and how popular the story was amongst Greek contemporaries?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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, okay,

Speaker 19 of how this worked. And of course, it got linked in with Christian stories, of Judeo-Christian stories, of humans being wiped out by floods because of their wickedness.

Speaker 19 it resonated with the story of Noah and the flood, the Deucalian Empirus story, the other flood.

Speaker 1 Solomon Gomorrah, a bit maybe as well.

Speaker 19 Absolutely. So apocalyptic punishment for decadence and overextending your empires.

Speaker 19 That resonates very profoundly, which allowed it to be one of the stories from pagan antiquity that were assimilated very easily to Christian morality.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But you know, Pompeii was first dug up much, much earlier in the Renaissance, and a few workmen dug up a few completely obscene images and hastily covered them up again.

Speaker 1 Secret cabinet, yes.

Speaker 19 Well, they thought it was devil's work. I mean,

Speaker 19 they at that time thought that the devil had left these sort of huge fallacies.

Speaker 19 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 did do indeed show an extraordinarily lively Macantar society, thoroughly hybrid, ethnically mixed with a lot of pleasure going on, you know, bordellos and theatre, rude graffiti, murals showing really quite extraordinarily rude sexual things.

Speaker 19 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. So Pompeii became yet another example.

Speaker 19 And of course, today, apocalyptic fiction of one kind and another has never been more more popular.

Speaker 19 I've heard of the term apocalypse porn. There's a whole sub-genre out there.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Atlantis sort of underlies far more stories than those just about Atlantis.

Speaker 1 Do you think there's a clear defining moment?

Speaker 1 It's probably too difficult to say it this one moment 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 saying, oh, Atlantis must have been this real place.

Speaker 1 Maybe it was over here or maybe it was over here or we can associate it with this.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Oh, it's right there in the Renaissance when people start reading Plato. People try to find it.

Speaker 19 And that, of course, is the great age of the first great European colonization of the Americas and India from the sort of 15th century onwards.

Speaker 19 So wherever they went, they were trying to find Atlantis.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 as we come to understand Plato's politics more. I mean, Atlantis has been discovered, you know, in the dogger bank.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes, they say Britain's Atlantis, Atlantis, don't they? They're the submerged land in the North Sea.

Speaker 19 I haven't done this research, but some other people have. It's been found in absolutely everywhere in the world in our ships of sail.

Speaker 19 People have said there's, and of course there are, all over the Mediterranean, there are submerged cities. Parts of northern Egypt fell off.

Speaker 19 There was a great British Museum exhibition lately of incredible finds off. the north coast of Egypt of bits of land fall off, water levels rise, cities get submerged.

Speaker 19 So you can actually sometimes find real cities that you can say must have been Atlantis.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Ask anybody wherever you go in the world. And they're discovering, once people actually got to the Australasian region, Tasmania, I mean, you name it, it's been Atlantis.

Speaker 1 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 is being discovered.

Speaker 1 It's actually something that people know.

Speaker 1 It's a great catchline for people nowadays.

Speaker 19 Exactly.

Speaker 19 So 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.

Speaker 1 Edith, you have explained brilliantly the context behind the story and why it's originally created by Plato, what a story it is, and the context of fourth century BC Athens.

Speaker 1 It just goes to me to say, Edith, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 19 Thank you, I've loved it.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. That was Professor Edith Hall talking through the real story of Atlantis.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That will be on a poll beneath the episode.

Speaker 1 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/slash subscribe.

Speaker 1 That's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker 4 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 6 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 8 I know, I'm putting them back.

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Speaker 1 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

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Speaker 7 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 13 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 10 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 4 Scratchers from the California lottery.

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Speaker 18 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

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