Did the lost advanced civilization trope appear in literature before the fall of Rome?

by [deleted]
edXcitizen87539319

There's Plato's mention of Atlantis in Critias. In a conversation with others, Plato has Critias describe a war which Critias says happened 9000 years earlier:

Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

Of course Atlantis is a mythical place, which in Plato's story was granted to Poseidon (god of the sea) when the gods divided the Earth among themselves. The Atlanteans had a pretty much perfect civilization, which Plato described in some detail. This story was intended not as a historical narrative, but as a (moral) lesson for the Greeks.