Plato's Warning, Not History

Plato described Atlantis around 360 BCE in two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. He portrayed it as a powerful island civilization that grew arrogant, attempted to conquer Athens, and was destroyed by the gods in a single day of earthquakes and floods.

The evidence against a literal Atlantis is substantial. Plato is the only ancient source for the tale, and no earlier writer describes such a place. His own student Aristotle is widely reported, through the later geographer Strabo, to have dismissed Atlantis as Plato's invention. The geological record shows no evidence of a sunken continent in the Atlantic.