Alan F. Alford - Atlantis Theory

Atlantis Theory

In The Atlantis Secret (2003), Alford criticised historicist interpretations of Plato’s Atlantis story and asserted that Atlantis never existed in a geographical sense. In keeping with recent Platonic scholarship, he took the story to be political allegory, based on Plato’s critical view of Athens’ status as a powerful but decadent maritime empire in the 5th century BC. But he argued that the story was simultaneously an allegory for the creation of the universe – following the geocentric cosmogony of the Greeks. In this way, he claimed that the story was indeed “true” – as Plato insisted it was – for the ancient sages believed that the myth of creation was a true account of how the universe had been brought into being.

The details of Alford’s theory are as follows: that Atlantis was a metaphor for the primeval underworld (the interior of the earth); that the invasion of the known world by Atlantis allegorised the eruption of the underworld; and that Ancient Athens represented the ideal city – an archetypal and metaphorical ‘city’ - which fell from the sky and defeated Atlantis by breaking into the underworld.

While much of Alford’s interpretation hinges on known parallels in Greek myth, for example Hesiod’s tale of the battle between the gods and the Titans, the key to his theory is his exploration of parallels between Greek and Near Eastern myths. Drawing upon the recent work of scholars such as Walter Burkert, Martin West, and Charles Penglase, Alford suggests that the Greek poets and philosophers borrowed from their Near Eastern neighbours mythical ideas such as: the birth of the universe in a cataclysm; the fall of the sky; the lowering of 'cities' from heaven to earth; the fall of the golden age; the wars of the gods of heaven and the underworld; the fall of gods, islands and continents from heaven into the underworld or subterranean sea; the birth of all things from the earth or subterranean sea; and the idea that mythical peoples dwelt in heaven, the earth and the underworld.

Alford’s theory has been attacked by supporters of a historical Atlantis. A classical scholar welcomed his approach and complimented his efforts to elucidate the story from a mythological perspective, while remaining cautious about the 'exploded planet hypothesis' for the myth of the falling sky.