Behind the Chart | on the making of 'Atlantis'
BTC02 || Why silence the gods? Why hold judgement, when we already know how the punishment was meted out?
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Behind the Chart
on the making of âAtlantis, the City that Keeps Forgettingâ
To be completely honest, there was already an Atlantis essay in my drafts. Different argument, different thesis â or rather, a thesis that tried to be several theses at once, which is the same thing as having no thesis. When I went back to read it before scheduling it, I knew almost immediately it wasnât going to work. Too wide. Too vague. It answered nothing with any real force because it was trying to answer everything.
So I started again from the one question that felt genuinely live to me: why does the Critias stop where it stops? Not at the end of a section. Not at a natural pause. But precisely at the moment Zeus begins to speak.
Why silence him? Why silence the gods? Why hold judgement, when we already know how the punishment was meted out?
What if it means Atlantisâ âourâ judgement is still ongoing? And why nobody else has asked this question before?
I stress-test arguments. Itâs not a method exactly, more a habit â I look for the thing that would break what Iâm trying to say, and I follow that until either the argument holds or it doesnât. The first thing that looked like it might break the cycle theory I have was what Iâve been calling the Nesselrath problem, after the classicist Heinz-GĂźnther Nesselrath whose work on Platoâs Atlantis dialogues is about as rigorous as this territory gets.
The problem was simple: if proto-Athens and Atlantis are the same city at different points in a moral cycle, youâd expect proto-Athens to eventually decay the way Atlantis did. But it doesnât. It gets destroyed by flood â the same flood that takes Atlantis â before any such decay can occur.
If we interpret the flood as punishment and nothing else, proto-Athensâs destruction makes no sense. A cycle driven by internal corruption canât account for what happens to the virtuous city â not on its own. Something else has to be going on. The flood is external. It doesnât care about moral status.
That sent me into flood mythology, which was a rabbit hole I was not expecting to enjoy as much as I did. Because here is the thing, almost every major civilisation has a flood myth, and their deeper meaning are almost never about water itself.
The Mesopotamian flood, the Deucalion myth, the Ogyges tradition in Greece, the Manu story in the Vedas, the Utnapishtim episode in Gilgamesh â these are structurally the same story, and the structure is not âterrible natural disasterâ but âthe world returning to a state before memory.â Before record. Before the accumulated weight of what happened previously. The flood is the reset. It is how the slate is wiped clean for the next generation to begin, innocent of what came before.
When I realised that, the problem dissolved â or rather, it turned into something more interesting. The flood was clearly not doing to Athens what it did to Atlantis. Atlantis gets pulled under as punishment, the external confirmation of an internal collapse. Proto-Athens gets pulled under as something closer to preservation: the only way a mortal city stays perfect is if it stops. It never decays because it never continues. But a city that has stopped cannot teach anyone anything. The knowledge goes down with it. What comes back up, eventually, is the name.
Iâm fairly sure that flood mythology lineage will be another essay. Probably a Myths & Legends piece â itâs too large and too interesting to leave as a footnote here.
Most of the serious scholarly work on the Atlantis dialogues is written by philosophers and classicists, and they approach Plato the way youâd expect: looking for the argument, the logical position, the philosophical claim. Which is the right approach for most of what he wrote. But it means they tend to read through the form of the text to reach its content â and in doing so, they miss what the form itself is doing.
This is, I will note, extremely ironic given the essayâs subject matter.
As someone who writes fiction, Iâve spent a lot of time thinking about how the container of a story is never neutral. The choice of narrator is an argument. The choice of what to leave incomplete is an argument. Even the choice of who speaks and who doesnât is an argument. When Plato decides that the speaker of the missing third dialogue â the Hermocrates, the final act of the trilogy â will be Hermocrates of Syracuse, that decision has weight.
Hermocrates isnât a household name, so let me give him a moment. In 415 BCE, Athens launched what is probably the most catastrophically overconfident military expedition in its history: the Sicilian Expedition, an attempt to extend Athenian imperial power to Syracuse, on the western edge of the Greek world.
The justifications were various. Not entirely dishonest, either â allied obligations, strategic arguments, the usual mix. But Thucydides, who documented the expedition in the History of the Peloponnesian War, isnât buying it, not fully. The Athenians were driven partly by the desire for Sicilyâs wealth. And partly by what he describes as eros â a passionate longing, almost irrational in its intensity, for more (the Platonian appetite).
Athens had convinced itself that the expansion was strategic. What it wanted was also, somehow, what it deserved.
The expedition ended in 413 BCE with the near-total destruction of the Athenian force. Of the thousands who sailed, almost none returned.
Hermocrates was the Syracusan general who won that battle. He defeated Athens at the precise moment when Athens was being most thoroughly Atlantean â A maritime empire, divine overconfidence and an appetite dressed in entitlement. And Plato, writing roughly forty years after the disaster, chose this man to deliver the divine verdict â the judgment Zeus was about to pronounce when the Critias broke off â in the dialogue that was never written.
This man, who had brought Athens (Platoâs Athens) to its knees, would be the one to deliver the gods judgement on Atlantis in the third book. This is clearly a mirror of Critias the Tyrant extolling the virtues of Athens.
Now tell me structure doesnât matter.
There was another small thing when it came to Critias relationship with Plato, which took me longer to resolve than it should have.
Scholarly shorthand calls him Platoâs uncle, and I used that framing instinctively for a long time before checking. Heâs more precisely Platoâs motherâs cousin â close enough that Plato certainly knew him personally and watched the whole arc of his life, but the simplification from cousin to uncle is itself a small example of what the essay itself is about.
Names do this. They shed precision over time and keep the affective weight â the intimacy, the family connection â without the actual texture of what the relationship was.
What matters for the essay isnât the exact degree of kinship of course, but the physical and emotional proximity â Plato watched this close relative accumulate and then abuse power, watched him push the Thirty Tyrants toward violence, watched him die in the democratic restoration of 403 BCE. And then, some thirty-odd years later, gave this very man the role of remembering Athensâs finest hour in a story about what happens when names outlast their meaning.
Whether Plato did this consciously I canât say. I think he did. But Iâll say this: if Critias is the best Athens could produce for carrying this particular memory â the most distinguished person available for the role of custodian of Athenian virtue and remembrance â then what does that say about everyone else?
What judgement is Plato passing on the entire political system, and on Athenians as a whole, if Critias is the best of them?
Finally, Platoâs cave.
Platoâs cave is one of those images that has been summarised so many times itâs become a shadow of itself â which is either ironic or appropriate, depending on how you look at it. You probably know the outline of it: prisoners chained underground, watching shadows on a wall, mistaking the shadows for reality.
The philosopher is the one who turns around, climbs out, sees the sun, and comes back to tell them the truth. He is, of course, doubted.
Thereâs a common reading of this that has been circulating for years and that flattens the caveâs meaning into one of: âquestion authorityâ or âdonât trust institutions.â And thatâs not wrong, exactly, but itâs also not the whole point.
The prisoners in the cave arenât ignorant â theyâre surrounded by information. They have access to everything the cave makes available. The problem isnât lack of data. Itâs epistemology. The shadows are moving, the prisoners are observing and describing them, they have a whole shared vocabulary for what they see. Thus they believe they know the shadows, and all there is to know about them.
What they donât have is the willingness â or the curiosity â of turning around and asking âWhere does it come from?â and âWhy?â and âHow?â and âIs there more?â.
Platoâs concern isnât that people know too little of their world. Itâs that they mistake access to representations for understanding of the things themselves.
Socrates as his mouthpiece, throughout the dialogues, refuses to simply give out conclusions. He makes people arrive to understanding. And he makes the journey difficult on purpose, because the moments of friction are where the understanding happens. A conclusion handed over without the work that produced it is nothing but an empty shadow. An empty name.
And here it all loops back to Atlantis. People are legitimately still looking for an actual island island, and not because theyâre credulous, nor because they havenât read the scholarship, but because they were given the name without the curiosity that generated it. They saw the shadow and theyâre looking for an explanation on the wall itself.
Or they are just talking about the shadow, and not looking for an explanation at all.
Thatâs the cave. Thatâs the trap.
Thatâs also the essayâs ultimate question â not whether we can find Atlantis itself (whether as submerged ruins, or as a societal ideal), but whether we still have or not the desire to understand it, pursue its meaning and see it for what it actually was.
Š 2026 E.M.V writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.If any of these threads interests you â the flood mythology lineage across civilisations, or the Hermocrates question and what it suggests about what Plato was actually doing with the trilogyâs structure â leave a comment.
A note on this piece being free:
Behind the Chart normally lives behind the Fathoms Deep paywall â itâs where the research goes that doesnât fit the essay, and itâs one of the things paid subscribers get access to alongside early reads, extended bibliography, and commentary on the research and editorial choices behind each piece.
Iâm making this one free because I want you to know what it is before I ask you to pay for it. If youâve read the Atlantis essay and this felt like the continuation of a conversation you wanted to have â thatâs what the paid tier is for.
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References and Further Reading For âAtlantis, the City that Keeps Forgettingâ
Primary Sources
Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Translated by Desmond Lee. Penguin Classics, 1971. â The most accessible single-volume translation for general readers; Leeâs introduction remains useful on the dialogueâs structure.
Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett Publishing, 1997.
Plato. Critias. Translated by Diskin Clay. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett Publishing, 1997. â Clayâs notes on the incompleteness of the Critias are particularly relevant to the argument made here.
Plato. Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett Publishing, 1997. â Books VIII and IX, on the constitutional cycle of decline, are essential context for the Atlantis dialogues.
Xenophon. Hellenica. Translated by Carleton L. Brownson. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1918â1921. â Books II.3âII.4 contain the primary account of Critias and the Thirty Tyrants; the speech of Critias in the Senate is in Book II.3.
Classical Commentary
Proclus. Commentary on Platoâs Timaeus. Translated by Harold Tarrant et al. Cambridge University Press, 2007. â Proclus surveys ancient debates about whether Atlantis was historical or invented; useful for tracing the reception question from antiquity.
Aristotle. On the Heavens. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1939. â The famous line attributed to Aristotle â that the man who invented Atlantis also destroyed it â survives through later testimony rather than in Aristotleâs own surviving text; the attribution is debated.
Scholarly Analysis
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. âAtlantis and the Nations.â Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 300â326. â The foundational modern scholarly argument for Atlantis as political allegory; the reading in this essay extends and departs from his conclusions.
Gill, Christopher. âPlatoâs Atlantis Story and the Birth of Fiction.â Philosophy and Literature 3, no. 1 (1979): 64â78. â Argues for reading the Atlantis dialogues as conscious fiction-making; includes the identification of Critias the speaker with Critias the Tyrant.
Nesselrath, Heinz-GĂźnther. Platon und die Erfindung von Atlantis. K.G. Saur, 2002. â The most rigorous philological examination of Platoâs invention; in German, but essential for anyone pursuing the question of the Hermocrates and the trilogyâs structure.
Broadie, Sarah. âNature and Craft in Platoâs Timaeus.â In Platoâs Timaeus as Cultural Icon, edited by Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils. University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. â On Platoâs constructive method in the dialogues.
Nails, Debra. The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics. Hackett Publishing, 2002. â Authoritative reference for the historical identities of characters in the dialogues, including Critias.
On the Constitutional Cycle and Political Theory
Plato. Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. Penguin Classics, 1970. â Platoâs late political philosophy, which revises and complicates the Republicâs constitutional sequence; useful background for the Atlantis argument.
Polybius. The Histories, Book VI. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press, 2010. â Contains the most fully developed ancient account of anacyclosis (the cycle of constitutional forms); Polybius builds explicitly on Plato and Aristotle.
On the Thirty Tyrants and Historical Context
Krentz, Peter. The Thirty at Athens. Cornell University Press, 1982. â The standard historical account of the junta; essential for understanding Critiasâs role and the political context of Platoâs early life.
Wolpert, Andrew. Remembering Defeat: Civil War and Civic Memory in Ancient Athens. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. â On how Athens processed and remembered the trauma of the Thirty; relevant to the essayâs argument about institutional memory and forgetting.
On Memory, Forgetting, and Civilisational Transmission
Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2011. â The most rigorous theoretical account of how civilisations construct and transmit collective memory; directly relevant to the Egyptian priestsâ diagnosis in the Timaeus.
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge University Press, 2011. â A useful complement to Jan Assmann, with particular attention to the archives and institutions through which memory is transmitted or lost.
Nunn, Patrick D. The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World. Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018. â On how oral traditions preserve and distort memory of catastrophic events across generations.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, 1982. â Essential background for the essayâs argument about institutional memory and the difference between oral and written transmission; Ongâs analysis of what writing preserves and what oral culture cannot hold is directly relevant to the Egyptian priestsâ diagnosis in the Timaeus.
Related Reading on the Fathoms Deep Archive
About the Author:
Morgan A. Drake crafts gothic paranormal fiction and dark maritime fantasy that explores the boundaries between historical seafaring traditions and the supernatural. Drawing on years of research into maritime mysteries and folklore, Morgan creates worlds where the line between natural and otherworldly perils blurs with the horizon.
Also from Morgan
A note on the Images: Unless credited, illustrations accompanying the posts are creative interpretations designed to evoke the atmosphere of maritime legend rather than serve as historical documentation. For historical visual references, please consult the sources listed in the references section.
Š 2026 E.M.V writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.