Atlantis: the Legend of a Lost City
A lavish storybook tells an iconic myth
Oh, Atlantis. The lost city and sunken kingdom, buried beneath the waves. It’s a mainstay in popular imagination, the subject of movies and comics and dubious pseudo-archaeology.
Atlantis is so heavily used in pop culture that it might be the most widely known location from Greek mythology. In this light, it’s a little surprising that all the ancient writings about Atlantis can be traced back to a single author. Two of Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, tell the story of the island that sank underwater. Atlantis appears in the dialogues as a metaphor for the decline and fall of civilizations, as well as a catalyst for discussing an ideal society.
There are some later texts from antiquity about Atlantis, but they all refer back directly to Plato. It’s not impossible that Plato took the idea for Atlantis from an oral source or a text that’s been lost to history: however, there’s a good chance that he made up the legendary city himself!
Regardless of its origins, Atlantis has held sway over our collective imaginations for centuries. Part of this sway comes from its frequent presence in children’s media. Take, for example, Christina Balit’s 1999 picture book, Atlantis: the Legend of a Lost City.
Christina Balit is a prolific British illustrator and author, probably best-known for her illuminations of children’s literature. I grew up pouring over her illustrations in several books, including a Nativity story, an introduction to astronomy, and, to no one’s surprise, a whole stack of myth retellings. Atlantis is one of these: I have fond memories of reading it with my brother when we were kids. He’s never been as much of a mythology nerd as I, but we both liked this book, especially its lavish artwork. To my delight, Balit is still working today: you can admire her more recent work on her Instagram.
Many of Balit’s illustrations appear in books written by other people, but for Atlantis, she created both the art and text. The story follows Poseidon as he falls in love with a coast-dwelling nymph, Cleito, starts a family with her, and builds a majestic island city for their children and their descendants.
Atlantis is one of very few pieces of media I’ve encountered where Poseidon is a sympathetic figure. He’s quite the multifaceted protagonist in this book: we see him as a lover, a family man, a creative soul, then ultimately a destructive force of nature. The story of Atlantis gives readers a more nuanced portrayal of the sea-god than many other Greek myths. In stories like the adventures of Odysseus or the contest for Athens, he’s volatile, overly competitive, and prone to tempestuous bursts of rage. We see him get destructive at the end of this story when he sinks Atlantis beneath the ocean: however, through the rest of the book, he’s a lot less frightening. He dedicates much more time to creation than to destruction here, first building a relationship with Cleito the nymph, then building Atlantis for their children. He’s also reluctant to initiate any destruction. In Balit’s version of the myth, he only sinks Atlantis because Zeus tells him to do something about the island after it falls into decline and its inhabitants become lawless and violent.
The myth of Atlantis dates back to classical-period Greece, but its themes and story draw from a more ancient period in history. Balit’s illustrations for Atlantis reflect this, taking heavy aesthetic cues from the Minoan civilization. The characters could have stepped straight out of frescoes from archaeological sites like Thera, with their wavy hair, tiered skirts, and boldly patterned tunics. The architecture of Atlantis is obviously Minoan as well, possibly based on excavations at Knossos on Crete. Since Poseidon is the protagonist of this story, there’s plenty of maritime imagery, including dolphins, octopi, and, of course, crashing waves. Lots of Minoan art incorporates marine themes, and Balit clearly took notes. The way she draws dolphins in particular look exactly like the dolphins in Minoan fresco paintings!
This Minoan imagery would fit any Greek myth retelling beautifully, but it’s especially apt for the story of Atlantis. There’s a long-standing scholarly argument that this myth serves as an exploration of a real natural disaster, and that the story of Poseidon destroying an island was an ancient Greek way of working through a cataclysmic environmental event. This disaster might have been the Thera Eruption, where a volcano caused long-lasting, devastating effects across the Eastern Mediterranean. The island of Santorini, which was called Thera in antiquity, owes its distinct semicircle shape to this eruption: the modern island is the rim of a crater the volcano left behind. More mysteriously, Atlantis could be an allegory for the Bronze Age Collapse. This is a historical event we know very little about, but we do know that it caused the downfall of multiple ancient civilizations, including the Mycenaeans in mainland Greece, the Hittite Empire in present-day Turkey, and the New Kingdom in Egypt. If this is interesting to you, I recommend checking out 1177 BCE, a book which is packed with information about the Bronze Age Collapse. There’s also a recently published graphic novel with the same title, based on the book. I’m planning to read it over the holidays this year: perhaps I’ll report back to you here on A Reception Collection when I’m done…
By taking inspiration from Minoan artwork, Balit subtly introduces her young readers to this ancient period in Greek history. There’s a non-zero chance that Atlantis has served as a first look at the Minoans for some of her readers. Many other Greek myth illustrators draw from the later classical and Hellenistic periods: at least, this was true in 1999 when Atlantis was published. Balit’s illustrations perpetuate a very old association of the Minoan period with myths and supernatural goings-on. Minoan civilization is so old that it was considered ancient and mysterious by the classical Greeks, who are now ancient to us. People in Plato’s time would have encountered Minoan ruins and undeciphered texts, and wondered about where they came from: this ancient presence worked its way into their mythology. Greek myths that feature Crete, the Minoans’ centre of power, usually involve supernatural monsters, deceit and trickery, and themes of the unknown. Think of the story of the Minotaur, which takes place at the palace of Knossos, and remember that the sorceress Circe has family ties to Cretan royalty.
Given how much we still have to learn about the Minoans, I find this association quite fitting. Their writing system, Linear A, is famously undeciphered, and we still have plenty of unanswered questions about their civilization and their world. Much of our information about the Minoans is filtered through later Greek writers, who mostly treat the Minoans as part of the realm of myth, instead of recorded history.
The Minoan coding that Balit deploys in her illustrations for Atlantis is nothing new. This coding appears all over the place in modern portrayals of ancient Greece, especially portrayals of the island of Crete. The Cretan characters in the perennial D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths dress in Minoan clothing, while other Greek characters wear outfits from the classical period, which began roughly half a century after the collapse of Minoan civilization. The video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is set in 431 BCE, in the middle of the classical period, but when players visit Crete, they get to investigate Bronze Age ruins and battle mythological monsters. The game’s depiction of Crete is that of a place more ancient than the world around it, slightly out of time.
When modern media like Atlantis: the Legend of a Lost City deploys these mythical, temporally disjointed ideas of Crete and of the Minoans, it’s harkening back to ways in which the classical-period Greeks thought about their own past. Atlantis’ beautiful Minoan-inspired visuals and classic story remind us that people have always been interested in the past, that we’ve always looked back with a curious eye to uncover mysteries and gain some understanding of the world through history. It takes ideas that (probably) originate in philosophical dialogue and transposes them into an exciting, evocative text for children. This is a lovely example of historical reception in action, on so many levels.
Ooooh, I love that book!