When Plato first wrote about Atlantis, he described a vast island “larger than Libya and Asia combined,” lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It was a land of engineers and builders, elephants roaming fertile plains, and canals carved in concentric rings around a glittering city. But in a single day and night, it was all swallowed by the sea, and gone, – poof! Like all my recent shares in green energy. For more than two thousand years, readers have argued over whether this was history, allegory, or something in between.
Now, most people imagine Atlantis sunbathing somewhere in the Med, sipping ancient mojitos, but what if it’s not all sunshine and lollipops? What if, bear with me on this, but what if, rather tragically and frostily, it’s under Antarctica, quietly suffering from an acute case of glacier-related gentrification?
Hold on… just checking I put bear with me and not bare with me, unless you want to of course… No? OK.
Charles Hapgood, a professor in the mid-20th century, proposed that Earth’s crust likes to play musical chairs every few millennia, dragging continents about like an indecisive interior designer. If this slippery tectonic dance happened around 9,600 BC – the same suspiciously precise date Plato gives for Atlantis’ demise, Antarctica might once have been basking in the sun, sporting grass skirts and a population of smug, ice-free Atlanteans.
Apparently, Einstein himself was intrigued, and not just in the polite way you nod at someone explaining NFTs. He called Hapgood’s theory “impressive,” which is physics professor code for “I don’t hate this.”
And then there are old maps, like the Piri Reis chart of 1513 and the Oronteus Finaeus map of 1531, appear to show the outline of Antarctica long before its official discovery in 1818. Some even show rivers and mountains now buried beneath two miles of frozen regret.
Meanwhile, entire forests have been found beneath the Antarctic ice, preserved like nature’s embarrassing childhood Facebook account. And then there are mammoths, mid-lunch, frozen with buttercups still on their tongues – a dietary choice I’d question even in warmer climates. But if they could be flash-frozen with their mouths full, could an entire civilization have shared that fate? It’s unlikely. But it’s also excellent dinner party conversation if people aren’t taking the hints and leaving.
Ever since Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, the theory’s been poked and prodded by everyone, like that last slice at the ‘office pizza party’. Some placed it in the Azores, others in the Sahara, still others in the Caribbean. The Nazis even got involved – Heinrich Himmler, obsessed with proving a mythical Aryan homeland, sent expeditions to Tibet and the far north, hoping to trace Atlantis.
Socrates never gets much mention here, but it was Socrates that Plato has sit and listen to a story about a mighty empire destroyed by hubris. Plato used Socrates as the main voice in most of his dialogues, but the “Socrates” we hear is often more Plato’s invention than the historical man. After Athens condemned Socrates to death, Plato, who had clearly admired his teacher, began to despise the democracy that voted to execute Socrates. In his later works, Plato started sketching alternative societies – most famously in The Republic, where he describes an ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings instead of the fickle mob. This, entering the picture in Timaeus and Critias, is of course Atlantis. – showing how societies collapse when they grow arrogant, corrupt, and unjust. Atlantis, then, might not be a place at all – but a tombstone carved in dialogue. A monument of what could have been. A civilisation as tribute, to honour a teacher silenced by the city he loved.
But whether Atlantis is a civilisation or something in the pages of Plato’s pain, the echoes are the same, – both beautifully, and tragically, about something lost.
:: REFERENCES ::
- The Atlantis Blueprint – Rand Flem-Ath & Colin Wilson
- Earth’s Shifting Crust – Charles Hapgood
- The Republic – Plato
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