Plato’s Atlantis
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato’s account of the once great island of Atlantis out to the west, beyond the world known to his fellow Athenians, and why it disappeared many thousands of years before his time. There are no sources for this story other than Plato, and he tells it across two of his works, the Timaeus and the Critias, tantalizing his readers with evidence that it is true and clues that it is a fantasy. Atlantis, for Plato, is a way to explore what an ideal republic really is, and whether Athens could be (or ever was) one; to European travellers in the Renaissance, though, his story reflected their own encounters with distant lands, previously unknown to them, spurring generations of explorers to scour the oceans and in the hope of finding a lost world.
Guests
- Edith Hall
19 episodes
Professor of Classics at Durham University -
Christopher Gill No other episodes
Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter - Angie Hobbs
24 episodes
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
Reading list
-
Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus
Sarah Broadie (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books → -
Atlantis: The Making of Myth
Phyllis Young Forsyth (Toronto University Press, 1980) Google Books → -
The Genre of the Atlantis Story
Christopher Gill Google Books → -
Plato's Atlantis Story: Text, Translation and Commentary
Christopher Gill (Liverpool University Press, 2017) Google Books → -
Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias
T. K. Johansen (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
The End of Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend
J. V. Luce (Thames and Hudson, 1969) Google Books → -
Designer History: Plato's Atlantis Story and Fourth-Century Ideology
K. A. Morgan -
Timaeus and Critias
Plato (trans. Desmond Lee) (Penguin, 2008) Google Books → -
Atlantis: Fact or Fiction?
Edwin S. Ramage (ed.) (Indiana University Press, 1978) Google Books → -
The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato's Myth
Pierre Vidal-Naquet (University of Exeter Press, 2007) Google Books → -
The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World
Pierre Vidal-Naquet (John Hopkins University Press, 1986) Google Books →
Related episodes
-
Plato’s Republic
29 Jun, 2017 100 Philosophy -
Plato’s Symposium
2 Jan, 2014 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy -
Thebes
23 Nov, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World -
The Battle of Salamis
23 Mar, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World -
Pericles
17 Sep, 2020 930 History of the Ancient World -
Xenophon
26 May, 2011 930 History of the Ancient World -
Plato’s Gorgias
25 Nov, 2021 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy -
The Odyssey
9 Sep, 2004 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures -
The Mytilenaean Debate
20 Jun, 2019 930 History of the Ancient World -
Socrates
27 Sep, 2007 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy -
Aristotle’s Politics
6 Nov, 2008 320 Political science -
Strabo’s Geographica
10 Apr, 2014 910 Geography and travel -
Thermopylae
5 Feb, 2004 930 History of the Ancient World -
The Philosophy of Love
29 Mar, 2001 120 Epistemology -
The Delphic Oracle
30 Sep, 2010 930 History of the Ancient World -
Herodotus
23 Sep, 2021 930 History of the Ancient World -
The Soul
6 Jun, 2002 120 Epistemology -
Modernist Utopias
10 Mar, 2005 320 Political science -
Aristotle’s Biology
7 Feb, 2019 570 Biology -
Utopia
7 Oct, 1999 320 Political science
Programme ID: m001c6t3
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c6t3
Auto-category: 100 (Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge)