Plato's dialogue here marks the first recorded mention of the legend of Atlantis, though scholars continue to debate whether he meant it as an allegory or historical narrative. It is a dialogue between the politicians Critias and Hermocrates with the philosophers Socrates and Timaeus.
Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece. He was also a mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his most-famous student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."