Plato

Plato was an Athenian philosopher, a student of Socrates and the founder of the Academy, a school in Athens. He wrote in the form of dialogues, usually with Socrates as the main speaker, and his works shaped Western philosophy more than almost any others.

Two late dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, written around 360 BCE, contain the story of Atlantis. In them a speaker says the tale reached Athens through the lawgiver Solon, who heard it from Egyptian priests at Sais: a great island power beyond the Pillars of Heracles that attacked the Mediterranean world and sank in a single day and night, about 9,000 years before Solon. Critias breaks off unfinished.

His Statesman includes another strange myth, of an age when the cosmos ran in reverse and people were born old and grew young.

No Greek writer before Plato mentions Atlantis, and no Egyptian record of it has been found. Most classicists read it as a philosophical fable Plato built to illustrate his ideal state, possibly drawing on real disasters such as the sinking of Helike in 373 BCE. Since the 19th century, writers on lost civilizations have treated it as history.