Allegory

An Allegory is the most common description of Plato’s Atlantis story offered by sceptics, eager to deny any historical value in the narrative. Parallels have been drawn with the Persian wars; Plato’s experiences in Syracuse and even more opaquely by Alan Alford, who proposed that “Atlantis – was an allegory for the myth of the creation of the Universe.”

Rand Flem-Ath quite reasonably argues that the idea of Atlantis as an allegory makes sense only if there is no realistic geographic explanation for Plato’s description of the site of the lost land. Consequently if an interpretation of the story can indicate a credible location and time for the destruction of Atlantis then the allegory theory is considerably weakened.

>>Last year (2023) Nikos Mavrakis from the UK’s University of Birmingham, School of Metallurgy and Materials published a paper^(a) offering a new allegorical interpretation of Plato’s Atlantis story. He “argues that Plato’s account can be seen as a reply to the Greeks’ views, partly influenced by Herodotus’s Histories, that the Egyptian civilization was superior to theirs.” Mavrakis infers that Herodotus was in effect an Egyptian propagandist, a view he incorporates in the title of his paper.<<

If the Atlantis mystery is ever finally resolved, I am inclined to think that it will be found that Plato used the actual prehistoric destruction of a powerful civilisation as the core for his story and wrapped it in the details of events closer to his own time presenting the entire account as a morality tale.

Nevertheless, it is interesting that Plato’s ‘ideal state’ of Atlantis is claimed as the inspiration for both Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ and St. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ among many others.

^(a) https://www.academia.edu/106733860/The_Story_of_Atlantis_as_an_Allegory_of_the_Ideal_State_and_a_Refutation_of_Egyptian_Propaganda?email_work_card=view-paper  *