Over 20 full-color maps and art reproductions

In his fascinating revisitation of the Atlantis myth from Plato to Hitler, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, preeminent leader in a new contemporary French scholarship of Greek thought and literature, treads where few classical historians have gone before. Beginning around the year 355 BCE, when Plato wrote his famous dialogues the Timaeus and the Critias, in which the philosopher describes the lost city as an example of what his ideal Republic could be or could have been, Vidal-Naquet traces Atlantis’ gradual metamorphosis over time from philosophical fable to supposed historic fact, revealing an early tendency on the part of some of the world’s great thinkers to sidestep the narrative’s instructive character, in favor of literal and often madly fantastical, occult or nationalistic interpretations. Spain, for example, believing that it was once connected by way of the lost continent to the Americas, used the Atlantis myth to justify its claim on the New World; stranger yet, an influential 15th-century savant by the name of Rudbeck convinced many that Uppsala, Sweden was once the capital of Atlantis; finally, Hitler’s ideologues made a strong case for Jesus’ Atlantean origins, thereby cleansing him of his undesirable Jewish status.

For almost a half century, Vidal-Naquet has been working out the premise that Plato’s Atlantis was, in contradiction to most theories, based upon ancient Athens. He points to Plato’s known dissatisfaction with narrative history as conceived by his Athenian contemporaries Thucydides and Herodotus. To parody and criticize them, Naquet explains, he wrote pages and pages of pseudo-history, notably on the topic of Atlantis. A succinct and elegant condensation of other scholarly treatments, this masterful study provides fresh insights on a perennially popular subject.