In the Timaeus and Critias, Plato speaks about the mythical island of Atlantis. Most (Plato) readers and commentators treat the story of Atlantis as a cautionary tales against hybris. One could also read it as an indirect proof of Pareto’s idea that when elites do not circulate, they become decadent and their decadence has tragic developmental implications.
Some readers, however, treat it as potentially legitimate account of the rise and fall of a lost civilization. After all, Troy was also believed to be a figment of Homer’s imagination until it was unearthed by Schliemann.
And precisely because Schliemann had been able to find Troy, some readers have been willing to believe in the existence of Atlantis and have attempted to identify its exact location. Several hypotheses have been formulated: Atlantis was identified with some islands in the Mediterranean sea (Sardinia, Malta) with Turkey, with Troy, with the Americas, with the British Isles, with Finland, with Denmark, with Sweden, with the Azores Islands, with the Canary Islands, with Cape Verde, with the Americas and the North Pole.
Most of these hypotheses can happily be rejected. In the Timaeus Plato wrote that “there was an island situated in front of the straits which you call the pillars of Heracles ; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean ; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a continent.”
The fact that, according to Plato, Atlantis was in front of the “straits which you call the pillars of Heracles” rules out the possibility that Atlantis was located in the Mediterranean sea, in the North Pole, the British Isles, Denmark, Sweden or Finland.
The fact that, also according to Plato, Atlantis “was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent” would compel one to reject the hypothesis that Atlantis was located somewhere in the Americas–which should probably, instead, be identified with “the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean”.
By excluding the Americas, the British Isles, the Scandinavian countries, the Islands of the Mediterranean, Troy and Turkey, one is left with two basic options: 1) that Atlantis should be identified with what are now the Azores or the Canary Islands or 2) that Atlantis should be identified with some other portion of the African continent.
The fact that, in the Critias, Plato claims that “there were a great number of elephants in the island” rules out the first of these two options–which means, by process of elimination, that Atlantis location, if it exists, should be somewhere in or somewhere near the African continent–as Frobenius or Zhirov have suggested.