Atlantis remains a perrenial fascination, wild theories as to its whereabouts abound and it sits only just behind the Grail, the Templars and so on in the volume of pseudoarchaeology it has inspired. Here the eminent historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet in what was to be his last work wastes little time in dismissing the arguments for a 'real' Atlantis, he has done that elsewhere, but instead concentrates on the uses that have been made of the myth of Atlantis by those who have chosen to believe in its actual existence. During antiquity the myth was more often than not seen as precisely that, and it...