Was Pompeii ever considered a myth like Atlantis?

by JokersChristmasWish
Tiako

Hmm, likely not. An important note is that Atlantis was not really a legend, or at least not nearly to the extent that it is today. It was almost certainly invented by Plato, where it is clearly an allegorical fable, and beyond that we only have scattered references that often treat it as an allegory rather than history. The only other mention I am familiar with (there may be more) is in Strabo (II.3.6):

On the other hand, he correctly sets down in his work the fact that the earth sometimes rises and undergoes settling processes, and undergoes changes that result from earthquakes and the other similar agencies, all of which I too have enumerated above. And on this point he does well to cite the statement of Plato that it is possible that the story about the island of Atlantis is not a fiction. Concerning Atlantis Plato relates that Solon, after having made inquiry of the Egyptian priests, reported that Atlantis did once exist, but disappeared — an island no smaller in size than a continent; and Poseidonius thinks that it is better to put the matter in that way than to say of Atlantis: "Its inventor caused it to disappear, just as did the Poet the wall of the Achaeans." And Poseidonius also conjectures that migration of the Cimbrians and their kinsfolk from their native country occurred as the result of an inundation of the sea that came on all of a sudden. And he suspects that the length of the inhabited world, being about seventy thousand stadia, is half of the entire circle on which it has been taken, so that, says he, if you sail from the west in a straight course you will reach India within the seventy thousand stadia.

Which shows that while some believed it to be history, it was very common for it to be treated as being invented by Plato. It only really became a serious myth in the 19^th century, when it was taken up by Theosophists, mystics, spiritualists, and later, Forteans. It's connection with the eruption of Thera is a recent development and, to my mind, probably quite incorrect. The actual narrative of Minoan civilization, which despite what much somewhat lazy scholarship has claimed persisted for centuries afterwards, argues against it; also worth noting is that the Santorini caldera was actually formed tens of thousands of years before the Minoan eruption.

So Atlantis is a very different kind of animal than Pompeii, whose destruction was well attested historically particularly in Pliny's famous letter. It was also, in the grand scheme of things, not a particularly significant event outside of its incalculable contribution to archaeology: for example, there was another large (although not as large) eruption in the late fifth century, and another major on in the seventeenth century, as well as several others.