Interpreting Atlantis: the ancient evidence

The topic of Atlantis now generates its own international conferences, and we have recently witnessed the publication of a varied and extensive set of proceedings from one of these. My interest, however, is accidental, deriving from my work on how the ancients read Plato. The story of Atlantis is told by a character in Plato, and tells of a great maritime nation destroyed by a flood. As part of a project funded by the Australian Research Council, I have just published a translation of the first book of Proclus’ 5th century AD commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, of which about two thirds is devoted to interpreting Plato’s story. Almost all that we know about how the ancients read Plato’s story comes from here. One obvious point to be made is that informed readers often treated it as some kind of allegory, rather than as a vehicle of any kind of remote historical truth. Why did they do so? And does not such an interpretation call into question the periodic claims of underwater archaeologists to have ‘found Atlantis’ in one region or another? The name “Atlantis” seems to be Plato’s invention, and if Plato’s tale were fictional then it would make nonsense to claim that the subject of that tale has been discovered.