Atlantis

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Atlantis is a story written by Plato about 2,600 years ago (www.dailymail.co.uk). Plato was a Greek philosopher that would write stories based off of traveler’s tales to teach important lessons to the citizens of Athens. In the story of Atlantis and in many of his other stories, he pointed to the failings of the city and the people who lived in it (www.telegraph.co.uk). Plato described Atlantis’s location as “an island situated in front of the straits called the Pillars of Hercules” in two of Plato’s dialogues: the Timaeus and Critias (www.dailymail.co.uk) (www.csiop.org).

Just like in Atlantis, the people of Athens had many problems that not many noticed. The story Atlantis warned the people of what would happen if they were too greedy and petty. They would be punished for their ways, and Plato was trying to warn the people of Athens that the same may happen to them if they didn’t change their way (www.science.nationalgeographic.com).

The legend of Atlantis is about a very modern, advanced civilization that lived in a large island founded by creators that were half god and half human. According to Plato, this island existed 9,000 years before him. Their islands contained exotic wildlife and precious metals, and they were very powerful. The

Hu 2 people of Atlantis became “morally bankrupt”; they started to be greedy and power-hungry. When Zeus saw this, he decided to punish the people of Atlantis by destroying the island with a tsunami. The island was lost in sea, and the people of Atlantis were never seen again (www.science.nationalgeographic.com).

Many argue that Atlantis is not just a legend and that Plato was actually writing about a real island in Timaeus and Critias. There is evidence that there are underwater ruins un...

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...any fact behind it at all, his legend still would have been mostly fictional. The “sightings” and “evidence” that proves that Atlantis is real doesn’t quite fit completely with the story, for example the time and the location could differ from where or when Plato described Atlantis to be. Plato himself has mentioned that a way to teach the younger generations a lesson is to make up a fictional story and then present it as real history (www.csiop.org). He may have simply used fiction to try to prove a point, but was misunderstood. There is a possibility that we have just taken a work of fiction and turned it into historical nonfiction

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(www.history.howstuffworks.com).

I believe that Atlantis did not exist. The only evidence that proves that it did was the story in Timaeus and Critias, which was only written as a fictional story to teach a lesson (www.csiop.org).