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Did an island actually sink in ancient Greece, due to a volcanic eruption or some other cataclysmic event perhaps?

Was it completely wiped off the map by a tsunami?

Did Plato base his story on fact or is it a work of fiction?

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  • Could it be this, that Plato was awake suddenly as philosopher simply by being shocked about an natural incident ?! By lost love or simply by an earthquake ?!
    – dschinn1001
    Commented May 17, 2015 at 13:45
  • Based on facts and fiction are not the only two options.
    – Roy
    Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 3:25

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We don't know. The only sources for the story are Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, for all we know the story of Atlantis is a completely fictitious product.

That said, any of the following historical catastrophes may have been an inspiration for Atlantis:

  • Minoan eruption

    Thera (partially) sunk as a result of the eruption, which also produced a tsunami that devastated Minoan Crete and reached as far as Egypt.

  • Helike

    The city was completely submerged by an earthquake or its subsequent tsunami in 373 BC, about a decade before Plato wrote Timaeus and Critias.

  • Pavlopetri

    The city was completely submerged by an earthquake sometime around 1000 BC.

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  • 5
    So I've spent my life searching for a completely fictitious product... this will not sit well with the wife.
    – Daft
    Commented May 15, 2015 at 12:30
  • @Daft Explain to her that you're just like a Trekkie, but of Atlantis. (And I am a Trekkie, so I mean that quite positively.)
    – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum
    Commented May 15, 2015 at 13:59
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In John Hale's "Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy", he argues that Atlantis was a thinly-veiled allegory for Athens itself and the collapse of their power after over-stretching themselves militarily. It's rather like "Gulliver's Travels" in that the political issues involved are obscured to us, but would have been glaringly obvious when it was written.

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  • Suggesting Plato is discussing a war between Athens and... Athens (at a later point in their history)? That does sounds interesting.
    – femtoRgon
    Commented May 15, 2015 at 17:16
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    ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​@femtoRgon In this interpretation, Atlantis stands for the actual Athens, and "ancient Athens" (the story's Athens) for Plato's idealized republic.
    – yannis
    Commented May 15, 2015 at 19:45
  • The specific issues of Gulliver's Travels are obscure to us today, but the tone of the story makes it blatantly obvious at several points that what you're reading is a satirical work of social commentary. I remember realizing this the first time I read Gulliver's Travels, back in the 7th grade. Assuming it's a satire, is Plato's Atlantis tale simply a lot more subtle about it?
    – Mason Wheeler
    Commented May 17, 2015 at 1:10
  • Not satire necessarily, but allegory. The people of Atlantis over-reached, and were punished -- much as Athens had (in Plato's belief) over-reached in their military ventures and been punished by disastrous defeats.
    – Rob Crawford
    Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 17:13
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Plato describes Atlantis as

Three rings of water with two rings of land surrounded the city center. The water rings were connected with canals and a 5-mile canal connected to the ocean. On the land rings were houses, various civic buildings, gardens, and other structures. The diameter of the entire city was only 2-miles. Surrounding the center city was a huge plain and a large mountainous area. Much of this land was of a rural nature with grazing animals.

Santorini would be a good match for this as it did have the required structure prior to c1645BC and it was also suject to a massive volcanic eruption probably somewhere between 1627BC and 1600BC which significantly changed the shape of the island and would have destroyed any civilisation based there.

Against this, Plato also said that Atlantis was "outside the Pillars of Heracles" (which are usually interpreted as being the Straits of Gibraltar) and that it was "an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia". Such constraints would put it somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, however there is no sign of any large sunken island there.

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Possibly the events in Syracuse were part of Plato's inspiration, cf. Gunnar Rudberg: Atlantis and Syracuse. - Yet possibly Plato talked of Atlantis as a real place, as some academics point out. Academic approaches towardas Plato's Atlantis as a real place can be found here: Atlantis-Scout

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