Few of Plato's fellow Greeks took his depiction of Atlantis literally. His own chief disciple Aristotle thought he made Atlantis up. Yet Plato's story is so detailed and circumstantial that many readers, even before the modern interest, found it hard to dismiss totally. With the opening up of the New World, several authors concluded that here was the real Atlantis to which Plato had referred, the obvious objection being that America was still there. 'Atlantis' was in fact proposed as a name for the New World before America was finally settled on.

The Thera eruption has also been pointed to as a key, not merely to the working of Plato's imagination, but to the origin of the whole story. Thera was an island outpost of Minoan Crete, and Atlantis' Cretan touches are clear. Was Plato's Atlantean empire, then, simply the Minoan, long since defunct, and exaggerated and set adrift by the passage of nine centuries? A related theory focuses on the warlike nature of Atlantis. Egyptian tradition recalled an aggressive alliance of 'Sea Peoples' who succeeded to Minoan maritime power and threatened the Egypt of Rameses III. These peoples included Tyrrhenians and Libyans, both noted by Plato. It has even been suggested that it may have been Troy and its devastation in the Trojan War, as related in Homer's Iliad, that gave rise to the legend. The problem is that there have been too many such conjectures, professedly locating the 'real' Atlantis not only in the Mediterranean but in such farflung places as Africa, the North Sea, the British Isles, Ceylon, Cambodia, et al.

The American visionary Edgar Cayce foretold that in the late 1960's the western part of the lost land would begin to reemerge in the Bahamas. This idea coincided well with folk traditions among native Caribbeans that their islands were once part of a single land-mass, connected together by a now sunken land. In 1968 (twenty-three years after Cayce's death) divers reported finding, near the Bahamian island of Andros, what looked like a ruined building on the seabed, and a road in the shallow waters near Bimini.