The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth

Pierre Vidal-Naquet's 2007 study (University of Exeter Press; original French L'Atlantide: Petite histoire d'un mythe platonicien, 2005) is the standard contemporary scholarly treatment of the Timaeus/Critias Atlantis tradition and its long history of literal-historical reinterpretation. Vidal-Naquet's position is sceptical of any historical Atlantis: he reads the dialogues as Platonic political philosophy in mythological form rather than as preserving any genuine ancient tradition. The work is the principal mainstream scholarly source against which alternative-archaeological Atlantis identifications (the mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Mauritania's Richat Structure) are positioned.