You're Dead to Me - Atlantis (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Stephen Kershaw and comedian Sophie Duker to dive into the myth of Atlantis.The Atlantean story has its origins in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. And literally nowhere else. Yet the enduring appeal of this mythical city and a sophisticated civilisation lost beneath the waves has lasted for thousands of years. It has inspired a huge number of stories and some very ropey documentaries. The myth also has a darker side, as the allegory of Atlantis has been used to try and justify racist philosophies and policies during some of the darkest events in history.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are jumping in our submarines, supercharging our crystals and boldly going where no one has gone before. Literally, because it never existed. It's Atlantis!

And to help us trace the history of one of the world's most enduring myths, I am joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a lecturer at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education. His research includes classical mythology and Greek and Roman history. He's the author of several books, including a fantastic illustrated children's encyclopedia of Greek myths called Mythologica. And lucky for us, he's also written A Brief History of Atlantis, Plato's Ideal State. It's Dr Stephen Kershaw. Welcome, Steve. Thank you very much, Greg. I'm delighted to be here. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning comedian. You'll have seen her on all the telly, Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week, Frankie Bonham's New World Order, and as a glorious champion on Taskmaster.

She won the 2021 Funny Women Best Comedy Writer Award. And of course, you'll remember her from our episodes on Ashanti Gana and Ramesses the Great. It's Sophie Duker. Welcome, Sophie. Hey, it's me. I know nothing. I'm so happy to be back. We're talking here about a subject that I'm assuming you know the name recognition, Atlantis. But do you know anything of the story, Sophie? It's got a strong brand, Atlantis. So yeah, I think it's got strong brand recognition. Atlantis feels like a really woolly area for me because I feel like there are lots of underwater world myths. And in the most recent Black Panther, for instance,

and we've been talking about Ashanti Garner and there's lots of stuff about beings and that sort of mysticism to do with the sea. But Atlantis isn't real, so... My stats on Narnia aren't that good, so I don't know that much about atlantis so what do you know all right well that leads us on to the so what do you know this is where i have a guess at what our listener might know about today's subject and let's be honest as sophie

says it's got a great brand it is one of the biggest tropes in pop culture Disney has done it twice really because they've done The Little Mermaid as well which is sort of Atlantean vibes oh yeah of course yeah there's also DC's Aquaman of course there's Marvel's Namor the Submariner which as you said showed up in Wakanda Forever there's the BBC series Atlantis there's Stargate Atlantis there's Tomb Raider Uncharted 3 in video games in cartoons you've got Transformers Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles SpongeBob and DuckTales all done Atlantis. There's Tomb Raider, Uncharted 3 in video games. In cartoons, you've got Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob and DuckTales, all done Atlantis. Then you've got Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and then Don't Get Me Started and all the documentaries and YouTube sort of things, all claiming to have solved the secrets of Atlantis. So clearly,

we're all obsessed with Atlantis. But where do these ideas come from? Let's find out, shall we? So right, Sophie, let's throw you in at the deep end. Sorry, another pun. Do you have any idea where does the Atlantean story begin? I want to tie it in with mermaids, but I get a sense that it's probably earlier than that. So I feel like when people started making long sea voyages, I think probably as long as there has been water.

OK. I feel like there's probably a lot of like, in like maybe like the 1500s. Oh, OK. So you're going sort of early modern, early modern. It feels like that's where like those tales would have proliferated. But I feel like you're going to say it's a lot earlier. I am going to say it's a lot earlier.

We're going back to ancient Greece to create our story here. And Steve, when I say ancient Greece, we're talking about one man, really, because it's not the Greeks per se. It's one dude. It's Plato. It is. Absolutely. So that's where it comes from. Atlantis. It's a Greek word. It means of Atlas. So it's the island of Atlas. And it's first described in a text by the ancient philosopher Plato. Plato and Plato wrote two amazing dialogue texts. There was one called the Timaeus, where he introduced Atlantis and the idea of it. And then another one called the Critias, where he gave a ton of detail, super detail about what the island was like and what its capital city was like.

And it seems that these two dialogues were actually part of an unfinished trilogy that he wrote sometime about 360 BCE. The dialogues are framed as discussions during a multi-day banquet between a group of guys. There's Socrates, who'd been Plato's teacher. There's Timaeus and Critias, who the dialogues are named after. There's another guy called Hermocrates, and they were going to name a dialogue after him. What happens, really, is that in the Timaeus text, Socrates wants to know about the ideal state. He wants to see how it will work under stress. And Critias, this guy, responds with a story, this amazing story of an aggressive

superpower called Atlantis that attacks ancient Athens and is then defeated and gets destroyed in a massive natural disaster. How does Critias know the story? Well, it's a strange one, really. As a boy, we're told that he heard it from his grandfather, who'd heard it from his dad, who'd heard it from a famous Greek lawmaker called Solon, who'd heard it from some wise Egyptian priests. Or so the story goes. Yeah. Sophie, when do you think these Egyptian priests say that this war between Atlantis and Athens had happened. I feel like they're not going to say it was like the other week. I feel like it's going to be sort of distant time. Tuesday, yeah. Maybe like 500 years before that?

They say it happens 9,000 years before the dinner party. Wow. Which is the Stone Age. So when there are no towns, let alone empires or wars, people don't even have bronze. So that's unlikely, I think we can say. But what else does Plato say, Steve? Because as Straits of Gibraltar. And it is huge. It's bigger, he says, than Libya, which is what the Greeks called Africa, and Asia combined. All right, vast. And it has a wondrous capital city as well that's formed of concentric rings of land and water. And this has developed an economy and a society with amazing engineering. They have bathhouses and canals, and they also have an absolutely humongous army. And apparently,

this imperial superpower attacked the Athenians with no justification whatsoever. And they, because they are really an embodiment of the ideal state, they're tough and virtuous, so they overcome the odds and they win and they defeat the Atlanteans. And then Atlantis itself suffers this kind of karmic destruction in a literally cataclysmic natural disaster. Atlantis is flooded and it sinks beneath the waves, never to be seen again. Yeah, again, 9,000 years beforehand, Stone Age Athens is literally probably three huts and a pig. It's just, you know, there's absolutely no way there's a town or a city there. But let's say Plato's got his dates muddled up and it actually happened, as Sophie says, 500 years earlier.

Why else do you think, Sophie, modern scholars such as Steve do not believe Atlantis was real? What else is lacking, do you think? Any physical artefacts or evidence from a massive city with loads of infrastructure? Absolutely. I suppose the argument would be it's all sunken, so we couldn't find it. But there's literally zero mention in any other source all we have is Plato yeah that's really unusual it's Greek mythology is it's like every myth is connected to every other one not with this this is a complete standalone story from Plato this is Plato's invention do you know know roughly what Plato might be getting at here with his analogy of a huge aggressive superpower

going to war with a little plucky underdog and then losing? Any clues on what he might be referencing? I think he might be... OK, I don't know. Is... I'm trying to think who the states might be. Have you seen the movie 300? I just remember a lot of chiselled thighs. Is it Sparta vibe?

Sparta is spot on for another rival. There's also the Persian Empire. So a lot of scholars, I think, Steve, would say this is a subtle analogy to the mighty Persian Empire attacking Athens and losing. But there's also, Steve, some would say that this is anti-democracy, right? This is Plato writing a book about why democracy is a bad idea. Absolutely. Plato is worried about the things that are going on in his own days. He's worried that the Athenians are going to go all imperialistic again and things will work out badly.

And so he can reference back to the Persian invasions and the 300 and also to wars that Athens has fought in the past as well, actually against the Spartans. He's got these ideas. And as you say, he really doesn't like democracy. He just thinks it's a chaotic mess. He's living in a tumultuous time, decades before he was born. As you said, Athens had heroically fought off the invading Persian superpower. So it's like a mirror of the Atlantis story. And then the Athenians themselves faced catastrophe and plague as well in the great Peloponnesian War. They fought against the Spartans. And one of the things they did was they invaded Sicily and they just got their asses kicked

royally by the Sicilians and by the Spartans. And Plato himself grew up during the Peloponnesian War. So I think we can see good reasons for why he would make these warnings against imperialism and bad political judgment and all that kind of thing. And he loves inventing myths. Myths are good to think with. You know, they help us think. He invents all these bizarre stories to make his points. The man in the cave, you know, the birth of love, the androgynes. Plato is well imaginative. I was quite depressed when he started talking about how all the Greek myths are usually integrated

because I was like, even in 360 BCE, there's no new ideas. And Plato's had the one original thought. People don't really kind of hoik up their tunics and jump on the Atlantis bandwagon. Everyone sort of goes, I don't know, it's not really a thing. And it sort of fizzles out a bit, doesn't it? It does, really. You go into the Greek and

Roman history after Plato and Atlantis is conspicuous by its absence. Plato's most famous pupil is Aristotle and he's incredibly dismissive about it. And then you get a Roman historian called Plutarch who wrote A Life of Solon. Eventually it kind of creeps back in, in early Christian writers like Tertullian, again, who sees it as an allegory. But it wasn't really until about the 5th century CE, so you're talking eight centuries after Plato or so, that there was a Neoplatonist philosopher called Proclus who noted early debates starting to break out now

with a character called Iamblichus introducing questions about its historicity. Yeah, I mean, Sophie, which of your jokes is most likely to be debated 800 years after you're gone? Will people think you existed? Maybe you'll be a myth, a legend. Sophie Dukas, she doesn't exist. She doesn't exist, but very useful politically. Yes. So for a thousand years or so after that, people are just like not bothering with the story. I mean, the Middle Ages,

Atlantis just does not resonate at all. No one cares. But there is this sort of reappearance after 1492. Sophie, do you know what happened in 1492? No. That is the correct answer. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Oh, God! That guy!

He discovers, inverted commas, the new world, inverted commas. And one of the first things that gets asked is, is this Atlantis? Ah! Is America Atlantis? Which is a kind of fascinating thing. I mean, Columbus doesn't think that, Steve, but other scholars, other poets, other philosophers are starting to ask that question, aren't they? Yes, they do. There was an Italian Renaissance scholar called Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato's works. He thought that Atlantis was real. And there's other books by Spanish historians who bring this so-called new

world, if you like, into the world of Greek mythology and geography. And they do it through Spain. They want to use these myths. Plato's Atlantis is right by Spain. The Straits of De Rolta, yeah. Yeah. And this allows the European colonizers now to start to justify the Spanish conquest by suggesting that the indigenous people there were once upon a time Spanish subjects. Unfortunately, the next thing in my script is equally problematic because then along comes Sir Francis Bacon, who talks about New Atlantis versus Old Atlantis, Steve. And this is also pretty yuck. Yes, another strange one. So he identified some old Atlanteans

and he thought that the old Atlanteans were the indigenous Mexicans. And he felt that because they'd almost been destroyed, they were sort of survivors from Atlantis and because they'd almost been destroyed, then that's why they were so uncivilised as he saw them. While the new Atlanteans that he brings on the scene are Christians and they are boldly resisting the decadent imperialism of Plato's old Atlanteans. It's strange stuff.

Sophie, so we're into the 1600s now and it's a long way from Plato, right? But this is probably me back explaining why I thought that Atlanta started in the 1500s. Because, watch me talk my way out of anything. It seems like for a while, as you said, it was just sort of like an intellectual curiosity for a lot of people. But with this movement over the seas and colonising, it becomes like a politically useful, motivating tool just to get people to think that other people are inferior. I mean, the stories don't end there. There's another story about this might, you know, Atlantis must clearly be Palestine before the Great Flood. So people are now starting to apply it to kind of, you know, the religious origin stories.

And then a surprise entry from Sweden. We get a chap called Elias Rudbeck. What's he claiming, Steve? He argues that Atlantis is situated in Sweden. And then his theory gets challenged by another really nationalistic project in the 18th century by Comte Jean-Rinaldo Carli, who wants to prove that Atlantis is the ancestor of Italy. wants to prove that Atlantis is the ancestor of Italy. And then France's entry into this sort of Eurovision Atlantis thing is a guy called Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who puts Atlantis in the Arctic now.

And there's a French occultist called Antoine Fabre d'Olivier, who says that Egypt now is the last domain of the Atlanteans. And he very disturbingly asserts that the white race owed their existence to the destruction of Atlantis. So we've got Sweden, Arctic, Egypt, Palestine, Mexico, North America, all being thrown into the hat now, Sophie. I mean, do you want to contribute? I mean, you might as well, Sophie. Do you want to add in your own? Maybe Stevenage, I think. Has anyone ever volunteered anywhere landlock do you want to contribute? I mean, you might as well, Sophie. Do you want to add in your own? Maybe Stevenage, I think. Has anyone ever volunteered anywhere landlocked for it to be? There are some sceptical voices in the 18th and 19th century

sort of saying, come on, come on. Bartoli, I think, is perhaps the sceptic I'm thinking of. That's right, Giuseppe Bartoli. In 1779, he wrote a book in which he made it very clear that Atlantis and its war with Athens was a metaphor for Plato's Athens and its own internal struggles. But everyone said, oh, dude, you're just mistranslating Plato. You don't know what you're talking about. So, I mean, Steve, by the late 19th century, are people coming around to Team Giuseppe? Are they, you know, are the sceptics in the ascendance?

Of course not. No, this Atlantis pseudoscience really dives into the deep end of the whole thing with the publication of a book by Ignatius Donnelly called Atlantis, the Anti-Diluvian World in 1882. He's an American congressman, and he asserted that Atlantis is real, that Plato is factual, and, more disturbingly, I think,

that various global cultures can all trace their roots back to a shared Atlantean origin story. Now, you've got to give Donnelly his due, I think. He himself was in favour of equal rights for black and indigenous Americans. What he's doing is reducing the achievements of all these non-Western cultures, including those across Africa and the Americas,

to their subjugation by the Atlantis Empire. Not everyone's a fan, though, Steve. I mean, his nickname, Sophie, do you want to guess his nicknames? Some of the insults that have flung his way. Aquaman. SpongeBob. His detractors call him the ignominious Donnelly, the prince of the crackpots,

and my favourite, the wild jackass of the prairie. I don't know what that's about. That seems quite specific. And Sophie, you might be thinking, well, this is a lot of men here. We've had a lot of chaps. We've had, you know, what is this, Mantis? We do have a lady theorist. She's quite famous, actually. She's called Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,

better known as Madame Blavatsky. She ramps it up, right? She takes Donnelly and she goes further. Oh, we're going stratospheric now. What she gives us is this kind of occult Atlantis as the origin of what she calls the fourth root race, which is the fourth of seven distinct races that are associated with seven eras of world history. So the root races idea is that the races have evolved physiologically as well. So she's giving Atlantean superpowers, Sophie. Oh. So do you want to guess what powers she describes them as having? I'm not going to go for the obvious one.

Maybe not the obvious one. I think they have visions. Ah. I think they're psychic in some way. They are psychic. Very good guess, yeah. I think they have psychic in some way. They are psychic. Very good guess. Yeah. I think they have like maybe sort of like elemental, so like water, like dominion over water. These are good guesses. Maybe they've got a thing where like if they don't like a certain flavour in a dish,

they can change it. So like from like sweet to salty or like umami to sour. So they're like culinary specialists. If only that were true yeah you're right with psychic yeah so blavatsky describes atlanteans as giants she says they're much much bigger than we are they have a magic third eye which allows them to have psychic powers they are able to wield electricity they also have flying airships a bit of sci-fi and a bit of theosophical at the same time, and also some sort of 19th century race science. And she says that, yes, the fifth root race are called Aryans. And you can probably guess where we're going next when that word rears its ugly head, Sophie. Is it Nazi time?

It is Nazi. To her defence, I don't think we're going to call madame blavatsky a nazi she's not a sympathizer but her ideas are appropriated and twisted and contorted and and sort of folded in to this new emergent occultist philosophy that explains the world through an aryan lens and i think steve i mean unfortunately the one i have to mention really is himmler hitler's right-hand man who sort of is leading a kind of large organization, really. Yeah, they've got this thing called the Ahnenerbe. It's the Institute of Ancestral Heritage. And he kind of sent out archaeologists and scientists and anthropologists, you know, all over the place to find proof of Aryan culture in places outside of Germany.

There's a character called Albert Herrmann, who is the professor of historical geography at the University of Berlin, who's using all sorts of dodgy methods to claim that Atlantis was in the salt lakes of Tunisia, but also that Atlantis itself had been a colony of Germanic Friesland. So essentially what's now the Netherlands. And that supposedly granted Germany an ancient heritage predating other notable European civilizations. And from his point of view, that justified military invasion to reclaim those lands for

the Third Reich. That's why this is so dangerous, I think. And, you know, use the same kind of methods to claim that actually Homer was writing about Germans when he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yeah, okay. It's a reach. Right. It's definitely a reach. You know, we're a comedy show, but all joking aside, this is super serious stuff. We have to be aware there is this hidden sinister heritage also lurking in the Atlantis myth.

So let's pivot away from the horrors of the Third Reich. There'll be people listening into this saying, well, hang on, Greg, you haven't talked about the Minoans and the volcanoes and eruptions and all that, the geology of the Atlantis. There is a huge amount of 20th century and 21st century investigation into the geology of whether there was a real Atlantis story. So, Steve, could we at least have a little quick summary of maybe the leading theory, which I guess would be the Minoan destruction idea? Yeah, that's right. In the late Bronze Age, there was a humongous volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini or Thera in the Aegean Sea that blew the island apart and destroyed a sort of Minoan looking town of Akrotiri there and caused very likely coastal flooding with tsunamis that may well have affected the Minoan power base in Crete. There were archaeologists in the early 20th century, so there was a guy called K.T. Frost

and Spyridon Marinatos, and they claimed that they could find similarities between Plato's Atlantis and the Bronze Age culture of the Minoans based on Crete. But when you actually stack up the evidence, it suggests that maybe, yes, the Minoans took a fairly hefty blow from this, but there are too many inconsistencies, I think, with Plato's story. There isn't a volcano in Plato, and Santorini is not out in the Atlantic. And the Minoan cultures lasted for really quite a long time after the eruption in any case. I mean, Sophie, if you Google Atlantis, you will get 233 million results. I find that fascinating

that we cannot stop thinking about this thing that Plato invented two and a half thousand years ago. Why do you think people are so drawn to it? And there will be people listening to this who probably are disappointed that we're saying this is not true. Why do you think that might be? I think it's a sense of something that was perfection and that is lost and that can be reclaimed if you only sort of access those superpowers, try hard enough, trace your lineage.

It's a very attractive idea. I think in a lot of the myths of lost cities, and in popular fiction I'm talking obviously about the film The Road to El Dorado. Whenever a city is lost, there's always a sense that after the cave falls in or the volcano erupts, that there is a chance that you could once again access that land that you've been to before.

The nuance window! This is where Sophie and I fetch our scuba gear and seismograph as we go hunting maybe for what might be Atlantis, but probably is more likely not. We let Dr. Steve tell us something we need to know for two minutes. So Steve, could we have the nuance window, please? Yeah, with pleasure. Did Atlantis ever really exist? Well, as we said, Plato's star student Aristotle didn't think so. But many others who interestingly to me are almost exclusively male have set out on this quest of discovery to find it. There's literally hundreds of these different

theories pretty well in every corner of the globe, you know, from Antarctica to Yuta Khan. But the theories which tend to be the stuff of the psychic and the pseudo archaeologist and the pseudo scientist are often very, very popular in our post-truth world. Should we be looking beyond the world of Plato's imagination? You know, Seeking Atlantis is a bit like trying to find Hogwarts in the Harry Potter novels on the basis of this veneer of reality that it has. But actually, there's no need to do that. It's all about the message of the story.

The Atlanteans seem like a super civilization living on an island paradise. But although they've got everything they could ever possibly want, they still yearn for more. And although they seem to be happy and blessed, once you scratch their glossy surface, you'll find a nasty, decadent, morally debased, dystopian nightmare. Essentially, Atlantis is Plato's anti-ideal state. It's hubristic, excessive, imperialistic, and its ambitions end in catastrophic defeat. So Plato's message to us is this, really. Keep it simple. Keep it modest and organized and unified. Don't overreach yourselves. Don't be like those imaginary Atlanteans. It can only end badly.

All you have to understand is that Atlantis style over the top luxury and aggressiveness can only lead to decay and disaster. And that's why I think Plato's story should be prescribed reading for every 21st century political leader. Lovely. Thank you, Steve. Sophie, should we be handing this out to MPs in Parliament? I mean, I kind of want that Atlanta soft life. Me too. Me too. Decadent duker. Me too, me too.

Decadent duker. It feels like definitely the Nazis, if that's Plato's hidden warning, kind of missed the point. Being like, you're not meant to relate to these characters. These are the bad guys. I think in all seriousness, that is something that probably could be more useful for us to remember. But I think the glamour of Atlantis is something that outshines, at least for me, the sort of cautionary tale that's embedded there as well. All that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you. In History Corner, we had the magnificent Dr Stephen Kershaw from Oxford University. Thank you, Steve.

My absolute pleasure, Greg. And in Comedy Corner, we had the sublime Sophie Duker. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. I feel like even though Atlantis is arguably not real, we're all going to be underwater soon, so this feels like a very timely topic for your dead to me. Oh, that's a pretty bleak way to finish, but yeah. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we sink beneath the waves of another historical tsunami.

But for now, I'm off to go and yell at some highly dubious documentaries on Netflix. Bye! Jason Manford here. And I'm Steve Edge. We just wanted to tell you about our new podcast from Radio 4 on BBC Sounds. Best Men, it's called.

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