Atlantis
or ATLANTICA, an island, said by Plato and others to have once existed in the ocean immediately beyond the Straits of Gades; that is, in what is now called the Atlantic Ocean, a short distance W. of the Straits of Gibraltar. Homer, Horace, and some others made two Atlanticas, distinguished as the Hesperides and the Elysian Fields, and believed to be the abodes of the blessed. Atlantis is represented as having ultimately sunk beneath the waves, leaving only isolated rocks and shoals in its place. "The New Atlantis" is the title which Lord Bacon gives to a literary fragment, in which he sketched out an ideal commonwealth.