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History Plus on Apple Podcasts. Airwave History Plus, the essential audio destination for history lovers. When Plato invented the story of Atlantis, and he most certainly invented it as an allegory

meant to illustrate how hubris can bring about the downfall of civilizations, he chose to place

the origin of the tale in Egypt, saying that Solon, who was actually Plato's ancestor, had received the

story from priests in Egypt, and that the priests knew the story because it had been inscribed

on pillars in a temple there. As indicated in the first part of this series, the story recalls Herodotus's

tale of receiving the history of Egypt from priests, and indeed, by some interpretations, the entire

allegory was meant to counter the growing Greek view that their civilization was inferior to that of Egypt,

or that Plato had taken his ideas about the ideal state from Egypt.

By this interpretation then, even though the story has it that Egyptians simply transmitted the story,

Atlantis was actually meant to represent Egypt,

to show that it was inferior to the quote-unquote perfect society of Athens, and that it had caused its own downfall.

In inventing this story, he may have been inspired by the attempted

Athenian conquest of Sicily, or perhaps by the very real destruction of Helike by tsunami,

which saw an actual city-state sunk, or rather submerged, much like Atlantis is in his story. However, he had plenty of other

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