A Brief History of Atlantis

The book opens with “Myths are good to think with” and poses the key questions: is the Atlantis Plato describes in the Timaeus and Critias a real island and a real geological event filtered through myth, or another kind of myth-making? The author's answer can be sensed from the start: Plato's story is a wonderful tale told to explore the questions “what is the ideal state, and how should it behave under the pressure of foreign invasion?” The real hero is not Atlantis but ancient Athens, the embodiment of the ideal state; Atlantis is the decaying imperialist aggressor.

Chapter one's strongest idea is simple but very effective: before Plato, Atlantis exists nowhere. Kershaw shows this point by point: there is no island called Atlantis in Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns or Pindar, in Herodotus the “Father of History”, in the three great Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, in Aristophanes, or on any vase painting or sculpture. It is no accident that Critias' listeners are astonished: they are hearing the name for the first time. Kershaw also explains an important linguistic detail: “Atlantis” in Greek means “of Atlas” — and this Atlas is not the Titan who holds up the sky, but the eldest son of Poseidon and Cleito.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to the “other” legendary islands of Greek myth, and these are the book's most enjoyable pages: Ogygia, where Calypso kept Odysseus for seven years; Scheria, where Odysseus washes up after his raft is wrecked, with Alcinous' palace guarded by gold and silver dogs and an orchard that bears fruit all year; Erytheia, where Heracles steals the cattle of three-bodied Geryon; the golden apples of the Hesperides; the Hyperboreans, who know neither illness nor old age. Kershaw shows that in antiquity, too, Strabo, Plutarch, Herodotus and others argued endlessly about where these places were — Eratosthenes said he would believe in Odysseus' voyage when someone found the leather-worker who stitched up the bag of winds.

This comparison reveals the book's core method: Plato's Atlantis — the concentric canals, temples clad in gold and silver, the bountiful island — is built from the familiar elements of legendary literature, like Homer's Scheria. Kershaw reminds us that Plato, who criticised Homer as a “maker of phantoms of virtue”, knew his poetry in every detail. The chapter ends with Herodotus' map of the world and the observation that here, too, there is no reference to Atlantis.

The book has weaknesses: the middle chapters sometimes turn into long lists of names and theories, the notes are many, and the Turkish translation is heavy in places and weighed down with bracketed explanations. Still, it is one of the most honest books you can read about Atlantis: the author treats both the comic theories and dangerous ideas like the Nazi “Atlantean race” with equal seriousness and traces every claim back to its source.

• The author's own new translation of the Timaeus and Critias
• Plentiful quotations from ancient sources and clear comparisons
• A cool, ironic approach to pseudoscience