But Ulf Erlingsson, a Swedish geographer, believes Plato combined elements from different times and places in the background description for his utopia. The distribution of the Atlantean empire seems to match that of the megaliths (large rough stone monuments) in Western Europe and North Africa. The geographic description of the island Atlantis, he suggests, is based on an island that is still standing today—Ireland.
“Just like Atlantis, Ireland is 300 miles [480 kilometers] long, 200 miles [320 kilometers] wide, and features a central plain that is open to the sea,” said Erlingsson, the author of Atlantis From a Geographer’s Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land.
“I have looked at geographical data of the whole world. Of the 50 largest islands, Ireland is the only one that matches Plato’s description of the landscape,” he added.
“The hill in which the Atlanteans’ maternal ancestor, Cleito, was born resembles Tara, the legendary seat of the high king of Ireland, while Newgrange resembles the palace of their paternal ancestor, Poseidon,” he said.
Or it was an invented rhetorical element…
I think that’s an overused cop out when it comes to old stories. Especially those which appear in the bible or other compilations which has old stories repurposed for cultist dogma.
So you think it’s more likely that:
there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together
And
There was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia
All evidence of which was destroyed but knowledge of it was passed orally in multiple cultures for 8000 years, only to be used by Plato as an allegory.
… Than that Plato invented a story for rhetorical purposes?