Plato's Timaeus and Critias were intended to evoke a model society to be revered and emulated-- ancient Athens, triumphant over Atlantean aggression, though itself extinguished. This was his Golden Age utopian vision. But by his creative genius he made the aggressors so interesting that he laid the basis for a mythology quite different than his own. Modern imagination has come to transfer the long-lost glory to Atlantis itself, giving it an importance and marvelous quality that transcends even Plato's conception.

The architect of the 'modern' Atlantis myth was an Irish-American politician, Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly believed Plato's story to be true, though only as part of the grander truth which he inferred on other grounds. Soundings in the Atlantic had revealed a tremendous undersea mountain range, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, running roughly north and south, its highest portion surfacing in the Azores. Donnelly seized on this as evidence for Atlantis, and in 1882, in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, he claimed that a sunken land did exist on the ocean floor. Twelve thousand years before it had been above water over a wide area, the last fragment of an even larger and older land-mass. This was the true site of Eden, and the home of a splendid civilization, unsurpassed in spiritual and creative genius, ancestral to several and senior to all. Its empire spread far in both directions. The civilizations of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru began as its principal offshoots. The gods and goddesses of mythology were its kings and queens, Greek, Hindu, Phoenician, and Scandinavian. Donnelly credited his Atlanteans with pioneering scientific medicine, the use of metals, alphabetic writing, and with creating or inspiring art works and monuments on both sides of the ocean. They practiced monotheistic sun- worship; early religions elsewhere reflected a decadence from this, following the parent country's submergence into the sea, itself accounting for all legends of a great Flood.