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Atlas was the firstborn son of Poseidon and Cleito, and the first king of Atlantis. In Plato’s account he ruled the central and most important part of the island. Both the island and the Atlantic Ocean were named after him.
The name Atlas also belongs to a Titan of Greek mythology. Below I set out the two figures side by side, and then what Ignatius Donnelly made of the link between them.
Atlas in Plato’s Critias
Plato tells the story in the Critias. Poseidon falls in love with Cleito, the only daughter of Evenor, one of the earth-born first men of the island, and his wife Leucippe. Their children are five pairs of twin sons. See Cleito and Poseidon for the parents.
He also begat and brought up five pairs of twin male children; and dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he gave to the first-born of the eldest pair his mother's dwelling and the surrounding allotment, which was the largest and best, and made him king over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many men, and a large territory. And he named them all; the eldest, who was the first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean were called Atlantic.
Plato, Critias (Jowett translation)
Atlas as first king. Plato makes Atlas king over his nine brothers and names the island and the ocean after him.
His line kept the throne. Plato says that “Atlas had a numerous and honourable family”, and that the eldest son handed the kingdom on to his eldest “for many generations”. Under the laws of Poseidon, the ten kings gave “the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas”. For the other nine kings, see Who Were the 12 Kings of Atlantis?.
Atlas the Titan in Greek mythology
In Greek myth, Atlas is a Titan, the son of Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene (or Asia), and a brother of Prometheus. After the war of the Titans against Zeus he was condemned to hold up the sky. Hesiod places him in the far west:
And Atlas through hard constraint upholds the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth before the clear-voiced Hesperides; for this lot wise Zeus assigned to him.
Hesiod, Theogony (Evelyn-White translation)
Atlas holds up the sky. Hesiod says Zeus gave Atlas this task, at the western edge of the earth near the Hesperides.
Later writers linked this Titan with the Atlas Mountains of northwest Africa. His daughters include the Hesperides, the Pleiades and the nymph Calypso. In antiquity he was also credited with knowledge of astronomy.
Donnelly: the Titans were the kings of Atlantis
Ignatius Donnelly, in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), follows Plato closely. He takes Atlas as the eldest son of Poseidon and the founder of the royal line. He then argues that the Greek Titans were a memory of the kings of Atlantis.
If we needed any further proof that the empire of the Titans was the empire of Atlantis, we would find it in the names of the Titans: among these were Oceanus, Saturn or Chronos, and Atlas; they were all the sons of Uranos.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)
The Titans as Atlanteans. Donnelly reads the names Oceanus, Chronos and Atlas among the Titans as proof that the Titan empire was Atlantis.
Donnelly also quotes Baldwin’s Ancient America on the name itself:
The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe. They are not Greek, and cannot be referred to any known language of the Old World.
Baldwin, Ancient America, p. 179, quoted by Ignatius Donnelly (1882)
A name from the other side of the ocean. Baldwin says the name has no European root. He traces it instead to the Nahuatl word atl, “water”, and to a town called Atlan in Darien.
Donnelly lists more echoes of Atlas:
- the Atlas Mountains on the African coast nearest to Atlantis, and the Atlantes people who lived there;
- the Hesperides as “daughters of Atlas”, whose home was an island in the ocean;
- Chibchacum, a god of the Chibcha people in Colombia, who “bears the world on his shoulders”, like Atlas.
Modern linguists still debate the etymology. One proposal derives the Greek name from a root meaning “to uphold, support”. Others suggest a Berber word for “mountain”. For more of Donnelly’s reading of Greek myth, see The kings of Atlantis become the Gods of the Greeks.
Bridgman-Metchim: Atlas in The Book of the Angels
D. Bridgman-Metchim, in Atlantis: The Book of the Angels (1903), stays faithful to Plato. He presents Atlas as the eldest son and the main ruler of the central portion, with the island and the ocean named after him.
His focus is on Atlas’s central role in government. He also stresses the lasting symbolic power of the name, which stands for strength and stability.
