The legend of Atlantis has become one of the 1OBSESS of modern popular culture. Quite literally dozens of books appear every year in the English language alone, each of them promising 2DRAMA new revelations, each of them claiming to have finally solved the riddle of the Lost Continent. Yet it was not always thus. Until the 3PUBLIC of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World in 1882, few paid attention to the strange story which had first appeared two thousand years earlier, in Plato’s 4POLITICS dialogues, the Timaeus and Critias. In these documents, Plato provides an all too brief description of the 5MYTH island, its history and culture, and its final destruction. In Plato’s account, the end of Atlantis is presented as 6ILLUSTRATE of a number of beliefs expounded by the Greek philosopher himself, most important of which was the theory of the cyclic nature of civilizations and the notion of how excessive arrogance is an 7INDICATE of a civilization’s impending collapse. It is true that in the immediate 8AFTER of the publication of Plato’s story, a good deal of interest was generated.