Atlantis meme

[CalMeacham]

@WernhamHogg

Ignatius Donnelly’s book precended it by 24 years, though he didn’t suppose it was “still alive,” he was the first to mount the hypothesis that Atlantis was a real place and a lost super-advanced civilization. Atlantis really begins with Donnelly, not Plato (at least as the OP puts it). Edit: I’ve since followed your link and see you write extensively about this book.

Donnelly was also the first to suggest Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. He was a prolific crackpot and theorist.

But Donnelly never said that Atlantis was an inhabited underwater city, which is the reason I brought that up (to answer the OP’s question). As you see from my essay, there’s a LOT about Donnelly’s book in it, including its central role in raising the modern interpretation of Atlantis (and the way that this is absent from, for instance, Jules Verne’s work).