My current obsession with ancient history pays off again and you guys get to enjoy my ramblings(Please don't run away).
There's a pretty good case to be made that Plato's Atlantis story is somewhat inspired by a bunch of shit that went about 1000 years before in the Bronze age. I know I'm not the first person to bring this up by a long shot but I'll lay out the salient points.
So basically Plato talks a bunch about how a VERY LONG TIME AGO(9000 years, I think the number Plato uses) Atlantis was a big Warmonging Maritime Power that attacked and conquered their neighbors and only Plunky little Athens(where Plato lived) could hold them back because Athens was cool and awesome and totally the good guys. And then the gods get mad about this and sink Atlantis somehow(Plato didn't really bother to finish the story but does a brief summary). Presumably Dramatically as the gods are wont to do and basically Plato wanted to make a point about Hubris.
-In the Late Bronze age the Minoan Civilization on Crete had conquered a bunch of the Aegean Islands in Maritime Empire and probably were harassing/raiding mainland Greece, until eventually the Mycenaean Bronze age Greeks took all the islands back and eventually conquered Crete, bringing the Minoan civilization down for good. The Minoans were also an advanced civilization for the Bronze age(having indoor plumbing in some of their cities).
-Around 1600 BCE, while the Minoans were still going strong in the ancient ancient Aegean, the island of Thera kind of had a massive ass Volcanic eruption that was big enough to only only blow the island into the sea, but probably also caused drastically altered weather patterns in Egypt and China as a result.
-Around 1200 BCE, the Bronze Age Collapse happens and more or less the eastern Mediterranean ends up in a Dark age for the next few centuries because shit stops getting written down and most of the political entities more or less fall apart for reasons we don't really know why.
So to sum up we have: Expansionist Maritime Empire gets kicked in the ass by Plunky Greek Mainlanders and ground into dust + Massive Volcanic Eruption Blows up Island and likely causes a Volcanic Winter for the region + Civilization collapses in the region and takes a few centuries to get back on it's feet. Do these 3 events connect with each other? Probably not, but it does kind of track with the broad strokes of the Atlantis Story, especially if Plato is using what little is remembered about said events 1000 years later to make his own points and the rest is a bit of creative license(A thousand years and a dark age is more then enough to muddle some dates, assuming plato didn't just nick the elements he wanted for his societal metaphor that is the Atlantis Story and knowing plato he likely did).
Of course, the big question mark here is just how much knowledge of the Minoan empire survived to classical Greece, but there's a lot of ancient documents we know about that didn't survive to the modern day(Most of the
Epic Cycle, for example). The Thera Explosion very likely was remembered in some form considered what a big fucking deal it probably was(Like on of the
largest volcanic explosions in recorded human history).