Plato's Atlantis purports to be the ideal city-state which existed in the golden age before human beings lost their portion of divinity. Plato conceives his ideal polis as a macrocosm of the body, and his conception of the body is dualist: the head, which in the body houses the soul, becomes in the state the home of political power. While the ‘body’ of the polis is conceived as a rectangular grid, divided by canals, power resides in a circular island surrounded by two concentric rings of land. Communication with the outside world is necessarily by sea, and is channelled via this circular ‘head’ Water passes through the ‘head’ to the ‘body’ just as air passes to the body through the head of the human being. At the centre of the ‘head’ in Atlantis is a sanctuary, with its standard Greek appurtenances of a temple, a grove and a spring, so ‘god’ is equivalent to ‘soul’. Close to the sanctuary is the palace, for the king is a descendant of the god Poseidon, and there is no cleavage between religion and politics in this Utopia. The inner ring-island is primarily defensive, and is occupied by warriors who maintain the power of the regime at the centre, whilst the outer ring-island contains a horse-racing circuit. There is of course no theatre in this state, for theatre, as Plato argued in The Republic, offers its public a debased view of the gods. The horses orbit the sanctuary of Poseidon at the centre as the planets orbit the earth, for the sacred circle of this city is not only a macrocosm of the head but a microcosm of the universe.