The Ancients - Atlantis

Episode Date: January 5, 2025

The story of Atlantis is one of history's enduring legends. So what’s the actual, ancient tale of Atlantis? Where does it come from? Was Atlantis real? And if not, why has the name become a byword for a lost city beneath the waves? In today's episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is back and ready to kick off 2025 with a bang. He is joined by Prof. Edith Hall to delve into the mystery that makes this fictional island so famous and discuss Atlantis's fictional origins in Plato's dialogues. Together they uncover why Plato created this mythical city and how it reflects his views on Athens' naval power, democracy, and morality.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Theme music from Motion Array, all other music from Epidemic SoundThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the ancient ad free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting HistoryHit.com slash subscribe. of 2025. We have so many exciting episodes coming your way with lots more ideas in the pipeline. Thank you for all of your suggestions for episodes we should do and for voting in our recent polls on Spotify also about what episodes we should cover. We're going to address all of those in due course over the weeks and months ahead.

Now back to today, we want to begin the new year with a bit of a bang. A name shrouded in mystery but also one that you would all recognise. Atlantis felt like a clear winner. Today Atlantis is quite the topic. It's regularly used in headlines whenever evidence of human activity and settlement is discovered underwater. I've certainly seen the headline Britain's Atlantis be used several times over the past few years to label new discoveries in the North Sea, for instance. Atlantis is also popular in TV and film. Think DC Universe's Aquaman or the BBC 2010 series Atlantis. The Lost City of Atlantis is a regular title of videos

and articles online today. So what's the actual ancient story of Atlantis? Where does it come from? Was Atlantis real? Were there any potential real inspirations for the story of Atlantis? And if it wasn't real, why has the name Atlantis become a byword for a lost city beneath the waves? Well to explain all, our guest today is the renowned Professor Edith Hall from Durham University. Edith is here to explain how the original story of Atlantis stems back more than 2000 years to the famous ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Sit back and relax as Edith talks through the ancient story of Atlantis and its links to the ancient Greek

world. Edith, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much. It's a delight for me as well. And to talk about this, the story of Atlantis, it feels like one of ancient history's most popular legends, and I stress legend, That still captures imaginations down to the present day. It's as popular as ever. 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, Medea

or Troy. It's something that everybody knows about. Anything that's actually been Disney-fied, of course, enters an international, global, popular culture dimension that we would love all of classics to. Probably at the moment only rivaled by gladiators. Absolutely. Atlantis, Hercules, all of those ones. Let's start off with one of the big questions. First of all, Atlantis, was it real? No. 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. It's the founding text of a genre that we all love, that is immensely popular, that has countless examples just in the classical

worlds of some of the greatest novels about Pompeii or the novels about Roman emperors, I, Claudius. 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. 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. But this specific story is absolutely fiction and it was fiction designed for a very particular purpose at a very particular time. Well, let's explore this first of all and that particular time. If you say this is the first

historical fiction story, so how far back in time are we going? When were these sources that talk about the ancient myth of Atlantis? 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 BC, so nearly two and a half thousand years ago, but they set the story at least 9,000 years prior to that. These are guys 2,500 years ago imagining what happened actually for us 11,500 years ago. Toby – And this is a time, 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? 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 the academy at some point in the very early fourth century BC. So this is a community of like-minded people, people who were rich enough and intellectually enough to want to spend their time discussing philosophical ideas. These dialogues almost certainly result from actual lecture courses

that he gave, these at least seminars, discussions in the philosophical history, 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. So we're just at the dawn actually of the ancient schools of philosophy, which were to go on for another 900 years until the schools were closed down by the Christian emperors.

So Timaeus and Critias, these particular dialogues, I mean, so what's the context of the story of Atlantis in these dialogues? Why are these figures meeting up and ultimately go about talking about this legend of Atlantis some 9,000 years before they're alive? These two dialogues form a pair, but they're also direct sequels to Plato's greatest work, The Republic. Now, The Republic is a dialogue set in 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, and decided what they needed to do on the suggestion of Socrates is think harder about this place. This is called Calypolis, 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 calipolis 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. So we don't need a virtual city, we've got an example of a real calipolis 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. Socrates has said he wants, throughout law, he wants a much more conservative, agrarian, very rigid class structure society in his hypothetical one, in the Republic. And lo and behold, Pritias 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. So in a way, you've got a strange hypothetical future meeting an actual, allegedly, materially historical path. So that's the conceit. But what Plato does very cleverly is actually cast while he's letting Critias, 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 Callipolis and its rival Atlantis, which is not Athenian, it's the complete opposite of Athens. It's a sea going place which gets destroyed because

it's sinful. 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. 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. 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? Critias says that he had heard it from his grandfather, also named Critias. That would be a man born in the much earlier 5th century. This grandfather had heard it from his grandfather, also named Critias, so that would be a man born in the

much earlier 5th century. And this grandfather had heard it from his father, and his grandfather was 90 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 a many generations ago ruler of Athens. Solon's relative, Dropedes, and Dropedes was Critias's great-grandfather. 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, alright? Critias is already six in the train. 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 200 years before the date of the dialogue where it's set. 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. It's a very peculiar way of setting up what's purportedly truth. I said, dubious credibility, and yet the author of it, whoever's talking about it, Chris, he asks, is saying, this is true because I've heard it from all of these people. The fact that I even have trouble remembering the detail in Plato's dialogue of these many hands is an example of how memory doesn't work when you're reporting it.

This is always, Plato is such a clever writer. He's shouting at us all, this is an unreliable, orally transmitted account, but I'm still going to let you have it anyway. So I think if we read these texts properly, Plato's admitting that it's as good as fiction. Toby So if we get to the story itself, if we focus on Atlantis first of all, what does Plato say about Atlantis? If I can remember correctly, he seems to go into quite a lot of detail as to the layout and structure of this city that he's created.

Oh yes, it's beautiful, listen. 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 Spain and France. They're these islands in the eastern Atlantic. It's called Atlantis, and Poseidon goes in and decides to actually set up people that, you know, it's not a proper community, it's not a proper civilization.

And he goes in and he actually changes the whole geological constitution by creating this central island, and that is then surrounded by concentric marine canals. So if you can imagine a circular island and then several alternating canals, which are just concentric rings and more blocks of land. He creates all these places and puts bridges over them. 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, and this is why people love it and why cartoon artists love it, detailed description of all these, especially the city center island, which has temples carved with the most beautiful colored 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. That's really, I think, that and the actual cataclysm of what makes the story what it is for posterity. Mason. 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 Atlantis alongside all these concentric rings and channels of water? Edith. 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'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. Oh, they invent it. Okay, yeah.

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. And so they have that naval power, I'm guessing is the next step of that kind of looking elsewhere, do they start forging an empire?

Yes, they start taking over other places just as the Athenian democracy had. They take over places from Tuscany to Egypt and they're expanding. And here I think that Plato is drawing actually on the Athenians' experience, not only of their own empire, but of the great Persian Empire. There's a certain amount of Persia in these Atlanteans. Also Phoenicians, because the Phoenicians were the great ancient sea power. So we sort of pick and choose from different, 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 actually get the 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 onto the ancient Athens, it didn't have. So they were actually lucky. He's implying they didn't need to build an empire. They had everything that they needed. Mason- Edith, it's also very interesting there because you mentioned the word Phoenicians, so like an ancient Carthage and as you say, a great maritime power. I think I remember hearing

you talking about this in the past, but if Atlantis is situated in the Atlantic, of course Greek traders aren't going that far west, but the Phoenicians of course are. I think there's one Phoenician explorer who may even circumnavigate Africa. Absolutely. Do you think there is that potential link with Phoenicians with the Atlantis story? I absolutely do. It's because they invented the sea power and the Greeks acknowledged that the first great sea power was not the Greeks, it was the Phoenicians. 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 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 9,000 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 these wicked barbarian nations. So no one to one correspondence really works. And I'm actually really the first scholar to have absolutely insisted on this. The most important article ever written was by a French scholar of considerable fame called Pierre Vidal-Nacay,

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 very often because of the cataclysm, they are the Minoans or Mycenaeans. This has been a very, very popular explanation. So classical Greeks know that the Bronze Age civilizations of Mycenae and Crete had gone under. They'd been destroyed. The Greeks had entered a dark age. They'd lost writing, their mode of production had actually regressed rather than progressed. In the case of Crete, it was very much 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. What I do is insist that no one will work. This is Plato imagining the

most glamorous but decadent possible primordial civilisation that was destroyed and he's using every kind of other civilisation he can to colour that in. Will Barron Well, if we go almost like the zenith, the climax of the story, Edith, how does this decadent Atlantean empire come into contact and conflict with this idealised Athens of 9,000 years ago? What's the story there? Well, the story is that the Atlanteans empire grows ever bigger and eventually the proud and noble race of Athenians decides to stand up against them. They're not going to become part of that empire. So there we very much have resonances of the

Persian War story, noble Greeks standing up against vastly larger forces from abroad and the huge navy as well as a huge army. And they come into conflict, but in fact, the gods before the Atlanteans can take over the Athenians, decide to destroy the entire civilisation and submerge it. Mason. We've mentioned it like that. That apocalyptic cataclysmic end is what happens to Atlantis. Atlantis is, in the original story, wiped off the face of the earth because of its own doing, basically. Anna Chalmers Because of its own doing. 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. So that's the story of Atlantis. 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 he wished it had been?

Edith Pettigrew 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 431 BC to 405-404. 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 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 the most radical Democrats weren't 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 entire Republic,

when he's building Kallipolis, it's very, Kallipolis 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 in the entire Republic, and that is the analogy of the ship of fools, which is where the democratic sailors of Deidre Mutiny against 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 where

the tyrants who took over Athens in 404, the Smythenian 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. 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 Thalassocracy was actually Minos in Crete. That's the society that got wiped out by Cataclysm. And the Thalassocracy 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 Thalysocracy again.

I had no idea just how much distaste Plato had for Athenian naval power. But I guess it also on a slight tangent maybe, but you mentioned earlier how part of the Atlantis story is originally that they're self-sufficient, they have enough supplies to look after themselves on their island. And I immediately think with Athens Athens, it's not just their warships. They are having to get grain imported from the Black Sea, from North Africa. Is Plato thinking about that as well, about ships having to bring in supplies to sustain Athens when it's an Athenian democracy? Niamh Well, he doesn't address that practical problem.

How are we going to make Athens a non-Thalysocracy? Given the shortage of resources in the land of Attica, which is quite barren, they simply couldn't fit. That's why they invaded Sicily. The greatest disaster that lay behind their eventual loss of the war was the 413 catastrophic attempt to annex Sicily, which is hard to believe now because it's so hot and dry, but was an incredible breadbasket. The Romans knew that. They had these huge Latifundia in the central plains of Sicily behind the mountains. These are the bread baskets. That's why they went there. That's why they needed to go to Egypt all the time for various different things to eat. And absolutely, that's why the Black Sea became so important.

So Plato doesn't address this, which might be a good moment to move on to his description through Critias of the Aboriginal Athenian society. Let's do it. 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 coasts of Greece, but nothing like what he's saying. And so his original Athens, it's emphatically mountain men who worked very hard, unlike the Atlanteans, but in a noble way, it's noble labor, and eat 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. 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 says basically that we should never have had Poseidon as the other god of Athens. Poseidon is the great god of the navy. There's a wonderful

passage in Aristophanes' Nights, which is actually a love song of the Athenian navy. That poem, that play is all about this huge number of passages directly designed for the sea men in the audience. 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. It's the craft god of Vestas 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. 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, and I think in particular the great

city-state of Syracuse? I don't know the answer to that, and I'm one of the greatest sceptics about accounts of Plato in visiting Dionysius the great tyrant of Syracuse. We don't know how the dates were in terms of his visits, 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. Mason- Fair enough. Okay, so 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? 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 then of course it got linked in with 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 Ducalian and Pyrrha story, the other flood.

A bit of Sodom and Gomorrah a bit maybe as well? 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. That was further ramified by the excavations at Pompeii. Now, that wasn't flood, that was volcanoes. Pompeii was first dug up much earlier in the Renaissance, and a few workmen dug up a few completely obscene images and hastily covered them up. The secret cabinet, yes.

They thought it was devil's work. They at that time thought that the devil had left these huge fallacies in this world. 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 do indeed show an extraordinarily lively mercantile 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. As you say, the secret museum within Naples, they were kept under lock and key for a very long time, the more obscene images. So Pompeii became yet another example. And of course, today, apocalyptic fiction of one kind and another has never been more

popular. I've heard of the term apocalypse porn. There's a whole subgenre out there. They're often set in the future, after whatever we humans do to the planet, we're going to have flood and fire, then endless TV shows with the premise that there are just a few survivors. Atlantis underlies far more stories than those just about Atlantis. Tobyus 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 he's rediscovered that this story of Atlantis is clearly just a legend that is created for his own for him to put forward his own point to then people saying

Atlantis must have been this real place. Maybe it was over here or maybe it was over here or we can associate it with this. Do you ever see a clear point when that starts becoming more, I'm not going to say mainstream, but more common that you get those sorts of interpretations? Oh, it's right there in the Renaissance when people start reading Plato. People try to find it. That, of course, is the great age of the first great European colonisation of the Americas and India for the 15th century onwards. So wherever they went, they were trying to find Atlantis. That delisuralist 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. Atlantis has been discovered in the Dogger Bank.

Oh yes, they say Britain's Atlantis, don't they? The submerged land in the North Sea. I haven't done this research, but some other people have. It's been found in absolutely everywhere in the world that our ships have sailed. People have said 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 off 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 traveler, ask anybody wherever you go in the world. And once people actually got to the Australasian region, Tasmania, I mean, you name it, it's been Atlantis. Mason- It's funny, isn't it? The word Atlantis has gone from being a place to actually just being the word that you say when an underwater archaeological treasure is being discovered. It's just something that people know. It's a great catchline for people nowadays. Sarah- 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. 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. It just goes to me to say Edith, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you, I've loved it. 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. 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 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 slash subscribe. That's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.