{"id":2315,"date":"2010-05-31T17:22:07","date_gmt":"2010-05-31T17:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/?p=2315"},"modified":"2025-11-22T11:09:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T11:09:55","slug":"allegory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/allegory\/","title":{"rendered":"Allegory"},"content":{"rendered":"

An<\/strong> A<\/strong>llegory<\/strong> is the most common description of Plato’s Atlantis story offered by sceptics, <\/a>eager to deny any historical value in the narrative. Parallels have been drawn with the Persian wars<\/a>; Plato\u2019s experiences in Syracuse<\/a> and even more opaquely by\u00a0Alan Alford<\/a>, who proposed that \u201cAtlantis \u2013 was an allegory for the myth of the creation of the Universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rand Flem-Ath<\/a> quite reasonably argues that the idea of Atlantis as an allegory makes sense only<\/em> if <\/em>there is no realistic geographic explanation for\u00a0Plato\u2019s description of the site of the lost land. Consequently if an interpretation of the story can indicate a credible location and<\/strong> time for the destruction of Atlantis, then the allegory theory is considerably weakened.<\/p>\n

Last year (2023) Nikos Mavrakis from the UK’s University of Birmingham, School of Metallurgy and Materials, published a paper(a) <\/sup> offering a new allegorical interpretation of Plato’s Atlantis story. He “argues that Plato\u2019s account can be seen as a reply to the Greeks\u2019 views, partly influenced by Herodotus\u2019s Histories, that the Egyptian civilization was superior to theirs.”<\/em> Mavrakis infers that Herodotus was in effect an Egyptian propagandist, a view he incorporates in the title of his paper.<\/p>\n

If the Atlantis mystery is ever finally resolved, I am inclined to think 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.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it is interesting that Plato\u2019s \u2018ideal state\u2019 of Atlantis is claimed as the inspiration for both Sir Thomas More\u2019s \u2018Utopia\u2019 and St. Augustine\u2019s \u2018City of God\u2019 among many others.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(a) <\/sup> 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<\/a>\u00a0 *<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s experiences in Syracuse and even more opaquely by\u00a0Alan Alford, who proposed that \u201cAtlantis \u2013 was an allegory for the myth of the creation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[337,338,85,336],"class_list":["post-2315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alan-alford","tag-rand-flem-ath","tag-sceptic","tag-syracuse"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2315"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65296,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions\/65296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlantipedia.ie\/samples\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}