The enduring lure of Atlantis
When you picture Atlantis, what do you see? For most people, this mythic city is a classical arcadia sunk beneath the sea – fallen columns, shattered arches and perhaps even an aqueduct. But that is not the place described by Plato, the original source of the Atlantis myth. His version consists of an immense Atlantic island, many millennia older than the Egyptian and Babylonian empires. The popular image of Atlantis was created by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
When that novel's narrator, Professor Pierre Aronnax, joins Captain Nemo on his underwater exploration, they encounter a ruined city. He notices temples and even 'the floating outline of a Parthenon'. Verne's Greco-Roman scenery has influenced almost all subsequent depictions of the city, right up to Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. But as Damian Le Bas observes:
Instead of having the architectural style of a mysterious 11,000-year-old empire, Atlantis looks just like the places its creator, Plato, lived in… It seems to be accidentally admitting that is where the 'lost city' was really born.
Le Bas became interested in the myth of Atlantis as a child. He was drawn to the idea of an underwater kingdom which mixed fantastical mermen with futuristic sub-marines. This interest revived as an adult when he began scuba diving after the death of his father. The Drowned Places is an account of a search for the city beneath the waves, an exploration of the lure of sunken settlements and a memoir of overcoming grief.
The search is never very serious. Le Bas visits some of the classical candidates that might have inspired Plato's story – Santorini, Helika, Pavlopetri – as well as other well-known underwater cities: Baia, near Naples, and the flooded streets of Port Royal in Jamaica.
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