Dan Snow's History Hit - Atlantis

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

The fictional island of Atlantis has intrigued and eluded us for millennia. First mentioned in the works of Plato, it's a story that captures our collective imagination - and yet it's almost certainly false.Dan is joined by Stephen Kershaw, author of "A Brief History of Atlantis: Plato's Ideal State". We're going to see if there are any grains of truth to the tale of this elusive island, and the people who supposedly lived there.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann. Edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. In 360 BC, Plato, the philosopher, wrote of an island. An island on which there had been an extraordinary advanced civilisation, but an island that was destroyed, submerged beneath the waves. It once lain beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, he said, the Pillars of Hercules. He writes, there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together. The name he gave it was Atlantis. And he wrote, now in this island of Atlantis there exists a confederation of kings of great

and marvellous power. He talks about the glorious buildings glittering with gold and gems, of the rich farmland of the advanced technology, of its domination over other peoples and islands nearby. But then he says they overreached themselves. violent earthquakes and floods. And in a single day and night of misfortune, all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared into the depths of the sea. And that was the end of Atlantis. But it was the beginning of a myth, a powerful myth, one that has intrigued and fascinated and driven people mad over more than 2,000 years. In this podcast, I'm going to look for Atlantis, or more precisely, I'm going to see if there are any grains of truth in Plato's fever dream. And why am I doing that? Because I've just returned from a long trip around Greece, in which Team History Hit did just that.

We looked for any real history that might have inspired Plato. And there's plenty there. Greece is a geologically active part of the world. There are volcanoes. There are earthquakes. There are tidal waves with great regularity. And there's certainly more than one city that was indeed inundated and sank beneath the waves.

My guide in Greece is also my guide on this podcast. He is Steve Kershaw. He's a historian and classicist at Oxford University. He's written a number of very brilliant books. He's written Atlantis. He's also written three battles that saved democracy. And there's no one better qualified to take us through the genesis and the development of the Atlantis myth and what it continues to mean today. If you're in the UK and you want to

watch that Atlantis documentary, well, it's on Channel 5. In fact, if you're listening to this pod when it comes out, it's this Sunday. It's Sunday the 24th of March. Check it out on Channel 5. There is a history hit version coming later in the year. But in the meantime, folks, this is a starter for 10, a little appetizer and a moose moosh. This is Steve Kirscher and me talking about Atlantis. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Steve Kershaw, let's get one thing completely clear here before we even move one step further

on. Is there a gigantic, lost, once glorious civilization called Atlantis lying on the bottom of the Mediterranean somewhere? No. There is a glorious, lost island of Atlantis living in the head of Plato, the philosopher, where it was created and where his student Aristotle said it was sunk as well. But I think it's a really long shot to find anything at the bottom of the Mediterranean, let alone the Atlantic. Let's come on to Plato's details in a sec, but let's start with what was Plato trying to achieve here? Is this writing an allegory, a myth? Is it a useful story to prove a kind of philosophical point? When he puts pen to paper, what's he setting out to do? Essentially, that's it. What happens is that it's in two of his dialogues that Atlantis appears, and only there, and that's the

first time it's appeared anywhere. And the first one is the Timaeus, the second one is the Critias, and in the Timaeus, it's Socrates and a bunch of his pals are having a really nice conversation about the nature of the ideal state. And this is what they're trying to organize. And what they do is they're very happy with the state they've created and they want to stress test it. They want to see how it works in time of war. And that provokes one of the guys that Socrates is talking to, to say, oh, that reminds me of this amazing story that I heard, and it came from generations and generations ago, about this amazing civilization out in the Atlantic that attacked Greece, and it attacked Egypt, and it was defeated by the Athenians, and then it sank beneath the waves.

And fundamentally, this story is introduced in order to make a political point. I think it's that imperialism is bad and specifically imperialism for the Athenians of Plato's day is a bad thing. He's saying, look at the example of these Atlanteans. They get far too big for their boots. They try to conquer civilizations that are essentially superior, morally superior to themselves, and they come unstuck. And what he wants is the people of his own day who are getting far too big for their boots to have a think about that and essentially back off from going over the top with their military ventures. Okay, so it's a useful, it's a philosophical device, very interesting.

The city is destroyed because of the wrath of the gods. They haven't just been defeated in battle by the Athenians, but they've enraged the gods, have they? The natural order has risen up and swamped them and shaken the city to its foundations and sunk it down. It hasn't. It's exactly what has happened. The Atlanteans were great once upon a time, but they went degenerate. Their divine part got sullied with mortal parts and they became degenerate. And so in the end, they had to be put a stop to. And in the dialogue, Zeus, the king of the gods, simply sinks the island beneath the waves in a literally cataclysmic event. Cataclysmos in Greek means a flood. And that's what happens. It just gets inundated under the waves. And this is not unusual, is it? Presumably

philosophers would come up with myths and allegories to kind of prove a point and illustrate their ideas to an audience. Very much so. You could say that myths are good to think with. And this is what Plato is doing. It's a really good way of getting important and complicated ideas across, perhaps without preaching, with inviting people to sort of unpack the stories and to extract the messages for themselves. And yeah, the philosophers are doing this all the time. Plato does it, so do many others.

So Steve, this is the big question. Why does this allegorical device develop the most astonishing afterlife? First of all, what would Plato have made of it? I think Plato would have been astounded. In a sense, he'd have been pleased at the longevity of the tale. But on the other hand, I can see him sort of stamping his foot in frustration and really saying, guys, you're missing the point here.

I wanted you to take my ideas away from it. And you've picked this thing up and you've run with it and you've taken it to completely different places. So I think, you know, he'd have been in a way highly delighted at the persistence of his work, but then frustrated at the way that it hasn't perhaps been received in the way that he intended. What's the reason for that, Steve? Was there a moment when it was sort of rescued from obscurity and repackaged as sort of pseudo history. Why has Atlantis had this astonishing durability? I think it's because it's an astonishing story. And one of the things is that in Plato's work, there is a wondrous description of the island and it's super

detailed and it's incredibly attractive. And to the point where you could, you know, if you wanted to make a model of his capital of Atlantis, it would be a really easy thing to do. He gives you all the measurements and all the way that the city is laid out. It is so convincing and it's so alluring. It's so seductive, I think. And after his lifetime, there was not that much interest in it. As I say, his main student, Aristotle, his greatest student, Aristotle, said that essentially he who created it also destroyed it. Plato creates his Atlantis and then he sinks it beneath the waves himself. But it came back, other philosophers became interested in it in the Roman period, because Plato was

admired so much, all of his work was taken almost as gospel truth. So if Plato says it happened, it must have happened. Such was his reputation. And then you get into the Middle Ages and it kind of disappears, but it really bounces back. Initially, I think, in the Renaissance period and certainly the time of the discovery of the Americas, when all of a sudden it becomes a useful tool to deal with a significant problem, I think. And this significant problem is that America isn't mentioned in the Bible. is that America isn't mentioned in the Bible. So how do we sort that out? Where has this come from?

And so something helpful might be Plato, the Atlantis story. There is this amazing sort of continent-sized island out in the Atlantic. So can we actually justify our prior ignorance of the Americas by going to Plato and saying, that solves our problem. Wow. Okay. And then that all then gets quite bound up in, well, racist ideas, you might say, about how they must have been somehow Europeans. These Aztecs and Incas couldn't have invented such elaborate and sophisticated civilizations had they not had their roots in a kind of European classical world? Very much so. It is that. The people encountering the Americas for the first time found these really fine civilizations,

you know, rich, loads of gold. And it was a sort of, how could this be? Ah, well, they must be somehow maybe the ancestors of the survivors of Plato's Atlantis who embedded themselves somehow in the Americas and carried, as you say, what was essentially European civilization with them to the Americas.

And it's an extraordinary idea, I think. You listened to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Atlantis. More coming up. mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And as someone who's written the book on Atlantis, Steve, your email inbox must be quite interesting. It gets very interesting from time to time. Things come out of the blue and everything that lands in my inbox is totally different to all of the other ones. I've had an extraordinary amount

of solutions to this problem and discoveries of the whereabouts of this island. It's something that has so attracted people to go on this extraordinary mission to find it. People embark on an extraordinary quest, I think, to find this and claw over the details of what Plato said and go on their journeys to find the lost continent. It's a wonderfully romantic idea. You and I drank a lot of wine in Greece and we read quite a bit of Plato together and it was like having my own wonderful tutorial. I was so lucky to have you there. And you introduced me to lots of other bits of Plato and it made me think, do you think he'd be a little bit confused today that he's one of the great philosophers, but he's primarily probably now

remembered in the wider public as actually a storyteller, as a writer of fiction, which is the person who came up with the story of Atlantis? Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny. I think, yes, I would have baffled him, I think. One of the things he does say is that he's quite happy to, if you like, to tell lies, false stories in order to reveal deeper truths, if you like. You can tell a story that is false, deeper truths, if you like. You can tell a story that is false, that is, if you like, factually false, but it can carry underneath it fundamental truths about life and the universe and everything. There's very much of that happening, I think, in his work. The character Critias in the Atlantis Dialogues is constantly saying, it's a true story, this, you know, it really is a true story. Hey guys, it's a true story. You've got to remember it's a true story, this, you know, it really is a true story. Hey guys, it's a true

story. You've got to remember it's a true story. You know, the man doth protest too much, methinks. But this is the bit that was of interest to me and why I was lucky enough to make a program all about it, is there is truth, not in the story itself, but in the context, I suppose, that ancient Greece, like modern Greece, was a seismologically active place. There are dozens of earthquakes a week there. There are volcanoes. There have been sea level rise and fall. Plato's writing this for an audience that are familiar with the idea of cataclysm in a way that is probably less true if you were writing this book in Wessex. There would be probably more rain and wind. Yes, I don't know how cataclysmic Wessex is, but it's a lovely idea.

But yes, that's absolutely true. Greece is a very active seismic area. And in Plato's own lifetime, the site of Helike on the Corinthian Gulf was inundated by a tsunami. So there is material there. In terms of perhaps inspiration for the story, was inundated by a tsunami. So there is material there. I don't, in terms of perhaps inspiration for the story,

one can look at events like that that are very real and very much in the forefront of his consciousness perhaps and that Helike itself had a significant temple of Poseidon, so does Atlantis and so on. And so there's these kind of things can easily arise as inspirations for tale-telling. The disappearance of a city was not something unknown to his audience in ancient Greece, right? No, it could happen. So, I mean, it did happen in his day. He could read Thucydides, for instance, where there's also a little island that during the Peloponnesian War

is hit by a tsunami. That island actually happens to be called Atalante. It's really close. So yeah, there are real life events that he can read about that he would have certainly known about during his lifetime. So yeah, you go to Greece, the ground shakes all the time. We went to a few different places. We went to, lucky enough to get to Akrotiri and Knossos, some of the Minoan civilization sites. Akrotiri is extraordinary, isn't it? It's on the island of Santorini, buried, it's, I feel bad saying this, but it's of Greece's Pompeii in a way. It's a town, city, port, buried seemingly quite catastrophically, quite suddenly under volcanic debris. Absolutely. It's a very moving site to go to, I think. And in its day, from the archaeology, it must have been a very thriving, dynamic

trading hub. It had contacts all across the Mediterranean, and it was destroyed in an absolutely humongous volcanic eruption that has, if you like, carved much of the present state of the island of Santorini and the complex of islands around it into what it is now. And yes, it was just, you know, completely wiped from the face of the earth, covered in amazing depth of volcanic ash, and then subsequently re-excavated with some extraordinary finds that we had terrific fun exploring on our visits to make the program. Do we have any sense whether the 4th century BC Athenians, would they have a memory, do we think, a history of that particular cataclysm? I find it unlikely. It doesn't seem

to filter through in any identifiable way in pretty much any of the literature, really. There are myths about the creation of Santorini, which is interesting. In one of the traditions, one of the Argonauts throws a clod of earth into the sea and the island of Santorini appears. But there's no corresponding myth of destruction in that area. So for me, it's very hard to find definitive echoes of that event filtering their way through to Plato's day. I mean, you're talking about a period of 1,200, 1,300 years, probably, between the volcanic eruption and Plato's writings. We've long been fascinated by Atlantis, when you took me to Knossos on Crete, seemingly one of the principal settlements of what is known as the

Minoan civilization. When that was excavated, there were articles in the Times of London saying, have we found Atlantis? Absolutely. Knossos became a candidate for that. And again, a wonderful, vibrant, highly sophisticated civilization that sounds a bit Atlantean, if you want it to, that ultimately disappears, you know, gets taken over by other cultures. And so it is this rise, fall, disappearance of civilizations is, again, a seductive idea. And yeah, the Minoans, you know, for a while became candidates for Atlanteans in a way. And as you explained to me on the site, the problem with that is it's self-perpetuating, isn't it? Because archaeologists start looking for a cataclysmic event.

So rather than just going, well, you know, there's probably just a bit of transition and change and eventual eclipse. And, you know, as is probably the normal run of things in the affairs of state, they were looking specifically for burn layers and sudden catastrophic interruptions to that particular civilization, that site. Yes. In many ways, there's nothing an archaeologist likes more than a single smoking gun. But in fact, it's probably less sexy than that in a sense. Generally speaking, with civilizations like this, you're dealing with process of transmission and sometimes assimilation as cultures move from one phase to another. So, I mean, you could create huge digital tsunami waves that can be washing their way over the whole of the island of Crete and

eradicating all the civilization and what have you, but that would not be close to reality, put it that way. So your sense, it is distinct in that case from something like the Trojan War myth and the Iliad that probably was based in some kind of memory of Bronze Age warfare. I mean, Plato could have been influenced by the Greece of his day, the disappearance of Elike while he was an adult. He knew people involved in that catastrophe. This is different. This is just a story.

Whereas the Trojan War, what's your belief? That's likely to have some kernel of truth at its heart? I think so, at least in some sense. There is a site there that, again, that suffers destruction. And in the region where it was at the time that it felt it was perhaps mythically destroyed. You know, it was a world of warfare. You know, warfare was the status quo in the region. So there's constant fighting and so on in that kind of area.

Again, you can create stories in a way to justify what you do. You know, in the end, the Greeks do take over the site of Troy. And in some ways, the Trojan War myth is a convenient justification for what they do. The Greeks take over this area and they say, well, it was a just war. We went to avenge the adultery of Paris and we cannot allow anything like that to exist. It hits at the heart of all our social life and the world that we live in. We can't allow that. So we're justified in going and attacking somewhere like Troy

and we can create stories of heroism to lay onto it in a way. So no kernel of truth at the heart of the Atlantis myth, very sadly. Yeah, it's interesting, Dan, I think, because it comes out, it does come out of nowhere. The vast mass of Greek mythology, Trojan War included, particularly in a way, is connected to all the other Greek mythology. Everything is connected to everything else. The characters are interrelated, the stories crisscross and what have you.

Nothing of the sort with the Atlantis. It's entirely a separate entity existing on its own with no relation to any other part of Greek mythology. Yes, that's interesting. I suppose that's such a good point. It's actually quite recent compared to the stories of the Olympians and the Titans and the Gorgons and things. We know the historicity of the evolution of this story. It was after the Battle of Marathon and Salamis and Plataea. It's quite recent. Absolutely.

Absolutely so. And I think, again, he's got these kind of things in his mind. You know, the Atlanteans are rather like the Persians who invade Greece, except that they just come from different directions in Plato. But they're really like the Persians

and the Persians come in. And what happens to the Persians? Like the Atlanteans, they get defeated by these plucky Athenians. This is the plucky Athenians defeat the Atlanteans. The plucky Athenians at Marathon defeat the Persians. They defeat them at the Battle of Salamis at sea as well. So the patterns are there, really interesting to see, I think.

Athens is plucky and successful and good at beating bad enemies who are bigger than them. Thanks so much for coming on. And Steve, tell everyone what your book on Atlantis is called. It's called A Brief History of Atlantis, Plato's Ideal State. And I've just finished reading your Three Battles That Saved Democracy, which is equally brilliant. So make sure you'll go and buy that, everybody. Thank you, Dan.