No serious historian that I know of has ever thought that the city/island/kingdom of Atlantis in Plato's "Timaeus" and then in "Critias" is actually real; for good reason. Timaeus is a philosophical dialogue about the nature of the physical world and about the nature of humanity. Critias is a second dialogue about the nature of hubris and how that relates to the city state. From the beginning, we've already left the shores of reality and have drifted off into the ocean of ideas.
νῆσος - (nesos, "island of Atlas") is almost certainly a fictional naval power which besieges an even more ancient Athens than the Athens that Plato is living in, which itself is probably the embodiment of Plato's imagined perfect state in "The Republic". This more than likely extends from the idea of the forms, which suggests that somewhere in the heavens there is a perfect example of a thing: such as the perfect table, the perfect chair, the perfect man, the perfect tile. Ancient Athens which looks very much like the perfect form of a city state, is attacked by the antagonistic naval power of Atlantis; it for this reason, it simply isn't sensible to look for a real island that existed when the rest of the philosophical dialogue is clearly Plato playing imaginary war games.
In that spirit, since playing games with ideas is both cheap and easy (because you don't even have to put your toys back into the box when you're done), I'm going to move around some of Plato's imaginary toy soldiers and try to guess where they could have come from.
"Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent."
- Plato, Critias
I have no idea how far Plato went in his life or what an Athenian knew about how much of the world existed. I do know that the Greeks generally and the Athenians specifically had a very dim view of everyone who weren't either civilised or didn't speak Greek.
The Greeks knew about Egypt and likely considered Egypt to be an empire of note but in 400BCE, even the Romans and Etruscans and Volsci are likely considered to be an uncultured rabble and therefore not worthy of thought.
If you are not Greek and also not civilised, then the Greeks considered you to be little more than children; who spoke in idiotic phrases like "Bar-bar-bar-bar", hence why practically everyone else is called Barbarians.
If we assume that Plato knows about the various Greek islands, then we can take it that the invading barbarians don't come from the eastern Mediterranean. Cyprus, Cos, Patmos, Lesbos, Crete - none of these places. It's also internally evident that Plato knows about places like Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, but it can not be any of these places since they are monolithic. Mallorca and the Balearic Islands might be a sensible candidate but since we're talking about control over the continent (which is almost certainly Europe) then it's possible but unlikely.
"Starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean."
- Plato, Critias
This is where my personal guess as to what Atlantis was based upon, gets its footing. The Pillars of Hercules (which also don't exist) are the place where Atlas is said to hold up the globe. Atlantis is apparently some place beyond them, which is already outside of the Mediterranean; which doesn't leave very many candidates at all.
Either you have sea faring barbarians who live on the west coast of Europe who find it easier to go around the Iberian Peninsula, or you have Britons and Celts, or at a very long thread being pulled, Vikings, Germanic peoples, and other Scandinavian peoples sailing around the entire continent of Europe to get to Athens.
Let me narrow the field to three:
Britons - This is the most likely candidate who fits the description of what the Greeks thought of barbarians, both geographically and let's be honest, culturally. The Romans would eventually give up on their project of trying to conquer the British Isles; they kind of didn't bother about Hibernia and built some walls in the north to mark where the literal end of civilisation was.
Spartans - Remember, although Plato is playing imaginary war games, Athens was actually engaged in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta at the time. That war concluded in 404BCE and if Critias is concluded in 400BCE at the latest, then inventing a back story for your imagined protagonist, which is a thinly veiled stand-in for your actual enemy, is a good guess.
Piraeus - Wait, what? This came out of nowhere. Piraeus is kind of a rocky outcrop on the Greek coast, which when Plato was writing was only connected to the mainland via a tidal land bridge. It is close enough to be the port for Athens but not actually within Athens.
I wouldn't put it past Plato, to be really petty about having to pay customs duties on something he bought and then going on a philosophical tirade against them. He could have made up all kinds of nonsense and because he changed the names, nobody would be any the wiser.
Based upon what I know of Plato from The Republic, I think that he's more likely to write about a personal petty vendetta than against some grand imagining of history; so my absolutely unqualified opinion is that Atlantis is a stand in for Piraeus and its imagined rulers are some traders that he didn't like.
Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box. It certainly is for me. My favourite cereal is Plat-O's.
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